Merja Kaipiainen
Virginia Woolf, Modernism and the Visual Arts
University of Tampere
School of Modern Languages and Translation Studies
Licentiate’s Dissertation in English Philology
February 2006
Tampereen yliopisto
Kieli- ja käännöstieteiden laitos
Merja Kaipiainen: Virginia Woolf, Modernism and the Visual Arts
Lisensiaatintutkimus, 208 s., liite 4 s.
Englantilainen filologia
Helmikuu 2006
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Virginia Woolf, Modernism and the Visual Arts -tutkimuksessa etsitään vastaavuuksia
Virginia Woolfin romaaneista ja kuvataiteista modernismin viitekehyksessä. Tutkittavat
teokset ovat Woolfin kokeelliset romaanit Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To
the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931) ja Between the Acts (1941). Tutkimukseni
käsitttelee modernismin käyttämiä keskeisiä esteettisiä keinoja Woolfin teoksissa,
maalaustaiteessa, valokuvassa ja elokuvassa. Toinen tärkeä aihepiiri on feminiininen
modernismi ja naistaiteilijat. Tutkimuksen teoreettisena viitekehyksenä ovat
kirjallisuustieteen ja taidehistorian tutkimus sekä feministinen teoria. Erityisesti
narratologinen teoria (Bal, Genette, Friedman, Rimmon-Kenan, Uspensky) ja kuvan ja sanan
välisten suhteiden tutkimus ovat keskeisiä teoreettisia apuvälineitä esteettisiä piirteitä
tarkasteltaessa. Tutkimuksessa käytetään myös muuta soveltuvaa teoriaa, esim. metaforan,
valokuvan ja elokuvan analyysejä.
Tutkimukseni ensimmäisessä osassa selvitetään modernismin keskeisiä piirteitä
kirjallisuudessa ja kuvataiteissa. Toisessa pääluvussa tutkin eräitä modernismin ideoita, jotka
liittyvät aikaan ja tilaan. Aika on kirjallisuuden peruselementti ja tila puolestaan kuvataiteen
tärkeä elementti. Moderni maalaustaide oli läheisessä vuorovaikutuksessa modernistisen
kirjallisuuden kanssa, ja kirjallisuudessa esiintyy samanlaista fragmentaarisuuden ja
samanaikaisuuden esittämistä kuin kuvataiteissa. Esimerkiksi kubismissa ja Virginia
Woolfin teoksissa on havaittavissa samanaikaisuuden kuvaamista ja moniperspektiivisyyttä,
mutta hänen romaaneissaan eri tavalla käsitettyinä ja esitettyinä kuin maalaustaiteessa.
Samanaikaisuus on yksi “tilallisen muodon”(Joseph Frankin termi spatial form) ilmentymä
Woolfin modernistisissa romaaneissa, ja tutkimukseni päätyy toteamukseen, että
spataalisuus on Woolfilla ainoastaan efekti, jonka kirjailija luo käyttämällä erilaisia
kirjallisia tekniikoita. Siten spatiaalinen muoto täytyykin aina käsittää metaforisesti, koska
kirjallisuuden on kielen lineaarisuudesta johtuen aina tyydyttävä kuvaamaaan tilaa ja
samanaikaisuutta ainoastaan mielikuvina, joista lukija muodostaa tilakokemuksensa.
Kuvataiteissa, erityisesti futurismissa, puolestaan pyrittiin kuvaamaan kirjallisuuden
keskeistä elementtiä aikaa. Woolfin romaanit muistuttavat elokuvaa, koska molemmissa aika
on ominaispiirre, johon nämä taidemuodot perustuvat. Olen analysoinut romaanien
aikarakenteita käyttäen apunani Gérard Genetten jaottelua (analepsis, prolepsis). Myös
elokuvakerronta rakentuu näille samoille muistelua ja tapahtumien ennakointia ilmentäville
tekniikoille, joita elokuvatutkimuksessa on kutsuttu nimillä takauma ja ennakointi. Etenkin
Jacob’s Room -romaanissa Woolf käyttää elokuvan montaasitekniikkaa.
Yhdistän tutkimuksessani mm. valokuvan, impressionistisen maalauksen ja Woolfin
hetkien kuvaamisen. Woolfin teoksista löytyy yhtäläisyyksiä James Joycen teoksien
2
yhteydessä käytetylle käsitteelle “epihanic moment”, joka on eräänlainen
uskonnollisluonteinen elämyksellinen oivalluksen hetki. Liittän tämän “epifaanisen hetken”
Henri-Cartier Bressonin valokuvan oivalluksen hetkeen, jota hän kutsuu “ratkaisevaksi
hetkeksi”. Sekä Cartier-Bressonin, Woolfin että impressionistien hetkessä on sama
haihtuvuuden ja hetkellisyyden ajatus kuin Baudelairen kuvauksissa modernin kokemuksen
luonteesta. Eräs keskeinen kysymys tutkimuksessani on sanan ja kuvan suhde Virginia
Woolfin romaaneissa. Tutkimuksessa todetaan, että Woolfin teksteistä on mahdollista löytää
vastineita visuaalisille kuville erilaisten kirjallisten keinojen avulla. Näitä keinoja ovat
esimerkiksi kuvaus, metafora ja ekfrasis.
Tutkimuksen kolmannessa osassa tarkastelen mm. Woolfin teosten yhteyksiä
symbolismiin ja surrealismiin, Woolfin teosten monimerkityksellisyyttä ja metaforisuutta.
Metaforisuus nähdään eräänä visuaalisuuden piirteenä Woolfilla, ja metafora ymmärretään
mentaalisen kuvan verbaalisena kuvana Mieke Balin määritelmän mukaan. Esimerkiksi To
the Lighthouse -romaani käsitetään kokonaisuutena mentaalisena kuvana, metaforana, jossa
rinnastuu kaksi toisiinsa liittymätöntä kuvaa. Modernissa kuvataiteessa, esim. Marcel
Duchampin teoksissa, metaforisuus liittyy ironiaan tai naissurrealisteilla ja Woolfin
romaanin To the Lighthouse Mrs Ramsayn hahmossa luonnosta kumpuavaan luovuuteen.
Työni neljännessä osassa etsin feminiinisen modernismin representaatioita Berthe
Morisot’n, Mary Cassattin, Gwen Johnin ja Vanessa Bellin maalauksista sekä Woolfin
romaaneista. Esimerkiksi rinnastamalla Woolfin teokset naisimpressionistien teoksiin pyrin
lukemaan impressionismia feminiinisenä taidesuuntauksena. Toisin kuin maskuliinisessa
taidekritiikissä, feminiinisyys ymmärretään tutkimuksessani modernismin “toiseutena”,
positiivisena tai arvovapaana ominaisuutena. Gwen Johnin kautta piirtyy kuva myös Virginia
Woolfista sisäisen maailman ja mielen kuvaajana ja Vanessa Bellin taiteen kautta Woolf
yhdistyy postimpressionistisen taiteen esteettisiin pyrkimyksiin ja keinoihin. Bellillä ja
Woolfilla postimpressionismi perustuu vahvasti itse elettyyn todellisuuteen eikä
konstruoituihin fantasioihin kuten esimerkiksi Picassolla ja Matissella.
3
Contents
Introduction
5
Part One MODERNISM IN ART AND LITERATURE
1.
The Modernist Novel
2.
Virginia Woolf and Visual Modernism
Part Two
14
TIME AND SPACE
30
41
3.
The Momentary Impression
4.
The Fusion of Temporal Dimensions
5.
Simultaneity and Multiple Perspectives
41
63
79
Part Three THE ART OF SUGGESTION
6.
The Symbolic Mode
7.
Correspondences of the Arts
8.
Ambiguity in Images
Part Four
14
99
99
114
129
FEMININE MODERNISM
145
9.
Virginia Woolf and Feminine Impressionism
10.
Images of Self in the Works of Gwen John and Virginia Woolf
11.
Feminine Versions of Post-Impressionism in Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf 170
Conclusion
180
Bibliography 187
Appendix
209
4
145
158
INTRODUCTION
In Virginia Woolf, Modernism and the Visual Arts I am looking for parallels between
Virginia Woolf’s experimental novels and the visual arts in the context of modernism. Even
though Virginia Woolf has become known chiefly as a writer, it is possible to see her also as
a visualizer in words, or even in images, for she showed enthusiasm also for domestic
photography. The family photographs taken and collected in albums by Woolf and her sister
Vanessa Bell are reproduced in a recent study written by Maggie Humm Modernist Women
and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (2002).
Furthermore, in her essay “The Cinema”(1926) Woolf discusses the possibilities of the new
art form of cinema, its capacity of presenting thought without the help of words. She saw the
huge potential of cinema not only in its visuality but in its power to express emotions, its
speed and slowness, the exactitude of reality, and its power of suggestion (Woolf 1966b,
268-72). Related to the discrepancy between word and image, the aim of this study is to offer
the reader of literature and the spectator of the visual arts new ways of reading different
works of art by juxtaposing visual and literary art.
Virginia Woolf’s novels are ideal material for this kind of study, because her work
contains many allusions and connections to visuality and the visual arts. Her novel To the
Lighthouse (1927) is a story of a female painter whose artistic creation and growth as an artist
is one of its central themes. Woolf’s fiction is linked with the visual arts also through their
modernism, for modernism was a common phenomenon in music, literature and the visual
arts. Modernist schools and movements were born in all the arts approximately at the same
time in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Impressionism and Symbolism) and in the
5
first decades of the twentieth century. Impressionism, Symbolism, Futurism and Surrealism
were movements both of literature and the visual arts, and many ideas, devices and stylistic
innovations were shared by all arts. But these ideas were expressed differently in different art
forms, according to their medium. Moreover, modernist literature is particularly visual, as
Mieke Bal points out (1997, 168), although already the nineteenth-century novel may be
characterized by an increasing appeal to visual display, for example in the works of Flaubert
and Zola. As an example of modernist visuality Bal quotes a passage from The Waves.
Virginia Woolf had also many connections with the art world, in particular through her
participation in the Bloomsbury group of writers and Post-Impressionist painters. Woolf was
in close contact and dialogue with the Bloomsbury painters, especially the influential
modernist art theorist and painter Roger Fry whose writings on modernist aesthetics Woolf
read.
The relations between different arts have interested writers and researchers already in
the days of antiquity. Aristotle in his Poetics discussed the affinities between literature
(tragedy) and painting, and called both the art forms imitations (Beardsley 1988, 159). Poetry
has been compared to painting in Horace’s Ars Poetica: “a poem is like a painting,” (ut
pictura poesis) and in the seventeenth century poetry and painting were often called “sister
arts,”as for example Dryden did in his preface “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting”to Du
Fresnoy’s De arte graphica. Dryden’s analogy was based on their common objectives of
unity, imitation, and controlling idea. (Beardsley 1988, 159; Kestner 1981, 102) Since poetry
and painting were widely regarded as “sister arts”it was, as Beardsley notes (ibid.), natural to
inquire whether the principles of both arts could not be derived from the same fundamental
principles.
6
Lessing made in his Laocoon (1766) a distinction between the temporal arts, i.e. music,
dance, and the novel, and the spatial arts, i.e. painting, sculpture, and architecture. Lessing
distinguished between two categories of art: the spatial arts based on the co-existence in
space and the temporal arts based on consecutiveness in time. The central characteristic of
the spatial art is simultaneity, and of the temporal art succession. The temporal arts are also
irreversible, while the spatial arts are reversible. According to Joseph Kestner (1981, 102-3),
all forms of literature, as well as cinema, dance and music, are temporal, consecutive and
irreversible. On the other hand, painting, sculpture, and architecture are spatial, simultaneous
and reversible. (Ibid.) Joseph Frank (1963, 6), seeing the value of Lessing’s theory, argues
that Laocoon’s importance in the history of aesthetic theory lies in the fact that Lessing
offered a new approach to aesthetic form.
Joseph Kestner (1981, 103) points out that Lessing does not take into account the
extra-medial effects by which the spatial arts create the illusion of succession or the temporal
arts the illusion of simultaneity. In his essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”(1945)
Joseph Frank has noticed that temporal arts do not have to express only meanings conveyed
by the primary illusion of their medium — for instance language in the novel expressing
succession — but by the use of different artistic devices they may also express spatial
relationships. Frank argues (1963, 8-9) that “modern literature, as exemplified by such
writers as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, is moving in the direction
of spatial form; and this tendency receives an original development in Djuna Barnes’
remarkable book Nightwood.” According to him, these writers “intend the reader to
apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence”(ibid.). Frank
does not mention Virginia Woolf among the writers whose work he characterizes by the term
spatial form, but in a later study Smitten & Daghistany’s Spatial Form in Narrative (1981),
7
her work has been characterized in terms of spatial form. Frank’s essay may be understood as
an attempt to see the modernist novel as a more visual form of literature than the traditional
novel. According to Frank (ibid.), on the level of aesthetic form, spatial form is a
characteristic of both modern literature and modern plastic arts. Frank claims that the
evolution of aesthetic form in the twentieth century has been identical in literature and plastic
arts: both have tried to get rid of the time elements in their structures.
Although Frank’s essay contains many allusions and analogies between literature and
the visual arts he did not emphasize, however, the interart relations, nor did he suggest that
modern literature was imitating the effects of the visual arts. Frank himself only points out
that they had a parallel development in the early part of the twentieth century. In my study
space and time are understood as central issues in the modernist novel and painting and in
Woolf’s fiction. An example of the spatialization of form in Woolf’s novels is simultaneity
(see ch. 5) which has a representation in the visual arts in Cubist paintings.
There exist many kinds of word-image/text-image studies both in art history and
literature. According to Ville Lukkarinen (1998, 101), it is a problematic field of study in
many respects, since we are dealing with two different semiotic systems, that of verbal
language and that of visual image. How can language be understood as an image, or how can
a picture be read as text or narrative? In the 1960s semioticians adapted the linguistic rules to
the analysis of images and treated any work of art as a cultural sign. They pointed out that
visual images, even realistic paintings and photographs, are in fact as conventional and
arbitrary as verbal language. (Ibid.) However, a visual image differs greatly from verbal
language, for example, an image cannot be analyzed and divided into phonemes, morphemes,
and sentences, nor is it possible always to point out which is the signifier and the signified in
a picture.
8
On the other hand, the visuality of literature has received attention in literary research
in recent years, for example, such aspects as description in a narrative, the so-called
ekphrasis research, which is concerned with literature where works of art are described and
commented, and the issue of the intertwining of time and space in literature (Mikkonen 1999,
116, 139). Word-image studies have often been described as a discipline which combines
both the research of art history and literary history. As a representative of this kind of studies
Wendy Steiner has analysed the rhetoric and metaphoric nature of images as an issue
connecting all research of art and literature. Also Mieke Bal, who is interested in visual
poetics, has written word-image studies for instance on Rembradt’s work. By visual poetics
Bal means the research of visual and spatial aspects, the discursiveness of visual art and the
possibilities of cooperation between the arts. (Ibid. 116-117) Bal has also written a study The
Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (1997) on the method of how to write an image and
on how to read this image. It proceeds in developing this method through a “visual”reading
of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu and selections from Contre Saint-Beuve. Bal
(1997, 3) points out that literature is a verbal art and the visual domain can only be presented
within it by means of different subterfuges. The principle means of visualization are
metaphor and description. The narrator describes what he/she sees: a space, a vision or a
visual representation, which may be an image, a painting, an engraving or a photograph.
My study is concerned with the ways the modernist ideas are expressed in literature and
the visual arts by juxtaposing Woolf’s modernist novels and different forms of visual art, i.e.
painting, photography and cinema. I have chosen as examples paintings and other visual art
works which express parallel ideas or contain corresponding aesthetic devices with Woolf’s
fiction. The innovations of modern painting such as fragmentation, new conception of
perspective and simultaneity influenced modernist literature, but also the impact of literature
9
and philosophy can be felt in modern painting. In my discussions I will deal in particular
with
the
following
modernist
art
movements:
Impressionism,
Symbolism,
Post-Impressionism, Futurism, and Cubism. Photography and cinema are emphasized
specifically in connection with time and space in the second part of the study.
The works which I will investigate are Woolf’s modernist novels Jacob’s Room (1922),
Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), and Between the Acts
(1941). In Jacob’s Room Woolf started her experimentation of the novel form but in this
novel she had not yet developed her technique of interior monologue which she used in her
next novels Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. However, Jacob’s Room already breaks
many conventions of the traditional novel, for example by abandoning plot and the division
into chapters and by introducing a fragmented, impressionistic narration built through
juxtaposition of different scenes and descriptive passages. In Mrs Dalloway Woolf
experimented for the first time the depiction of consciousness and used different devices to
depict non-linearity, simultaneity, fragmentariness and momentary impressions, in other
words, devices which were central features of modernist expression. In Mrs Dalloway these
features of modern experience are connected to the experience of modern city life. Modernist
painting also depicted modern city life and technological innovations, as we will discover in
my study.
Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts share a structural resemblance:
they all depict the events of one day, although different time schemes are embedded within
these one-day structures. The Waves covers a time-span from childhood to maturity, but the
interludes placed between the monologues all put together describe one day from dawn till
dusk. In Parts II and III of the study I will study the temporal and spatial structures and
devices of these novels and look for parallel techniques in visual modernism, photography
10
and cinema. In particular, I will interpet The Waves and To the Lighthouse as ambiguous
works which in their suggestiveness and symbolism offer possibilities for finding analogies
in the work of Symbolist or Synthetist painters. In To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts
Woolf describes the work of a woman artist and the difficulties and prejudices which a
female artist confronts in patriarchal society.
My study is an investigation of some central aesthetic devices and notions of
modernism, but on the other hand, it is also a feminist reading of the modernist work of some
women artists and the “femininity” of modernism. My first aim is to discover analogies
between Woolf’s novels and the visual arts as regards some of modernism’s central ideas and
aesthetic devices. I will look for ideas related to spatial and temporal features in modernism
such as instantaneity, fugitiveness, simultaneity, and non-linearity, or aspects of ambiguity
and suggestiveness. Another central aim of my study is to examine the work of modernist
women artists and to discuss their conribution to modernism. I will look for the “otherness”
of modernism through the works of “the feminine” characteristics of the Impressionists
Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, the English painters Gwen John and Vanessa Bell, and
Virginia Woolf. The third aim of this investigation is to explore the relationship between
word and image in the context of modernism. For instance, I will pay attention to verbal
representations of visuality in Woolf’s novels such as metaphor, description, spatial form and
ekphrasis.
The principal research methods are comparison and close reading. Especially in the
analysis of spatial and temporal devices my study benefits greatly from narratolgical theories,
but particularly in the chapters on the feminine modernism I rely on feminist theory. My
purpose is to combine different theories of literature and art history in order to analyze my
material with the help of theories that suit best the object of analysis at hand. Because the
11
study is interdisciplinary I have to draw from a variety of theories and sources, and therefore
its theoretical framework may not always appear as uniform as in narrower investigations,
for example in studies concentrating on fiction, or in studies focusing only on art. Also the
feminist point of view requires its own theory. I will combine both old and new theory
especially in the analysis of literary devices such as metaphors, symbols and narrative
structures because this kind of theory does not change radically in the course of time the same
way as the social discourses of contemporary literary and art studies.
The feminist theory which I apply in the last part of my study “Feminine Modernism”
is related to the discussion of the gendering of art, on which for instance Norma Broude has
paid attention in her feminist study Impressionism. A Feminist Reading. The Gendering of
Art, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century (1991). With the help of Broude’s theory
I will connect Woolf to certain schools of modernism which I interpret in gendered terms. I
will regender Impressionism as “feminine” after it has been gendered as “masculine” by
many critics of the twentieth century. My aim in gendering Impressionism as feminine serves
the purpose of finding common characteristics between female artists and Virginia Woolf in
order to show that not all modernist art is what the masculinist art criticism suggests and that
there is another modernism, the “otherness”expressed in the “feminine”characteristics of
female artists and writers.
I have divided the study in four parts according to different general themes. The first
part is a general introduction of modernist literature and art. Parts II and III are about some
aesthetic and structural issues in Woolf’s fiction and parallel questions in the visual arts. Part
IV concentrates on the analysis of women’s art and feminine modernism. Part II deals with
some aesthetic questions concerning time and space in Woolf’s fiction. These issues are
linked to analoguous themes in photography, cinema and modernist painting, as well as the
12
philosophy of Henri Bergson. In Part III, I will discuss the symbolism in Woolf’s novels and
their relationship to Symbolist art. In chapter 9 I will introduce the work of women
Impressionists Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt whose paintings I juxtapose with Woolf’s
novels and through a gendered reading of Impressionism find common themes in Woolf’s
and the women Impressionists work. In chapter 10, I will continue my search of
representations of feminine modernism in the paintings of Gwen John and Woolf’s novels.
Chapter 11 explores feminine versions of Post-Impressionist art in the work of Vanessa Bell
and Virginia Woolf.
13
PART ONE
MODERNISM IN ART AND LITERATURE
1. The Modernist Novel
It is an impossible task to define the modernist novel, and thus instead of a definition, I will
present some central features of modernism. John Orr (1991, 619) has claimed that there is no
such thing as the modernist novel. According to Orr, it is a critical artifact, largely
Anglo-American in origin and use, and thus for example the French normally speak of “la
modernité”and “le postmoderne.”1 A special difficulty in the definition of modernism is that
modernism can be seen either as applying to a particular period, or as describing a certain
artistic posture, an attitude toward the modern (see Brooks 1991, 119). Instead of modernism,
also Paul de Man speaks of “modernity”which does not only refer to one isolable historical
period (de Man 1983, 148). The definition of the modernist novel depends also on who is
giving the definition, at which historical moment and in which country the definition is given.
It is likely that our sex, race, nationality, class and other related matters affect our point of
view, the way we think about the modernist novel. For example, the traditional literary
histories have usually excluded modernist women writers, or on the other hand regarded
them as “minor modernists”leaving them in the shadow of “major modernists”such as Joyce,
Conrad, Lawrence, Hemingway, etc. This was a usual practice especially before the 1980’s,
the rise of feminist literary studies.
1
In the 1920s the term modernism became to be associated with experimentation in the arts instead of only a
general sense of sympathy with the modern. However, the adjective ‘modern’was still more emphasized than
‘modernism’in works using the term ‘modernism’, e.g. A Survey of Modernist Poetry by Laura Riding and
Robert Graves (1927), I. A. Richard’s The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and F. R. Leavis’New
Bearings in English Poetry (1932) (see Faulkner 1977, Introduction, VIII).
14
The difficulty of defining the modernist novel is enhanced by the emergence of
post-colonial criticisms which question the Eurocentric conception of modernism by
pointing out that modernism was indebted to “primitive”cultures. The Europeans imported
into Europe an alternative view of the world in the form of African masks, carvings and
jewellery, which influenced e.g. the works of Picasso, Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence
(Ashcroft et al 1989, 156). The influence of primitive art on Picasso’s early Cubist works
such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is often cited in accounts of modernist art. The
influence of primitivism and primitive art was felt in literature as well, for a great deal of
modernist experimentation in both prose and poetry was inspired to some extent by Cubism.
For example, the Cubist techniques of fragmentation, multiple perspectives and juxtaposition
are used by the modernist writers as well. Direct Cubist influence is perhaps best exemplified
by Gertrude Stein who consciously thought of her own literary experiments as parallels to
modern painting. For example her book Three Lives (1909) was written in response to a
portrait by Cézanne, and her literary “portraits”were modelled on the Cubist paintings by
Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris. (MacLeod 1999, 202)
As Michael Bell (1999, 23) suggests, by the early twentieth century the primitive alter
ego was seen more honorifically and a changing attitude to the colonial “other”reflects a
changing self-perception in the European. For instance Freud was fascinated by primitive life,
and C. G. Jung and D. H. Lawrence showed an interest in the repressed instinctual realm of
the psyche. In Lawrence’s Rainbow (1915) a character has returned from colonial service in
Africa, and through his African experience has made contact with a lost aspect of himself, i.e.
a primitive “other.”According to Bell, Lawrence was the most important modern primitivist,
but also the most serious critic of primitivism as a decadent symptom. (Ibid. 23-24) Like
many modernists, Lawrence substituted “the primitive”for other categories which obsessed
15
him, e.g. miners and working-class men; vital masculinity (dependent on the right kind of
femininity; phallic power; “the primitive,”natural harmony (Torgovnick 1990, 159).
According to Peter Faulkner (1977, 6), the modernist writers’theoretical concern is
one characteristic of modernism. Many modernist writers, e.g. Charles Baudelaire, Henry
James, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Foster, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, wrote essays or theory
on literature, and also among modernist painters an interest in theoretical matters was
significant, for example Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevitšand Robert Delaunay wrote
about art alongside with their practice of the art. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) wrote
essays on art, literature and other subjects including women, beauty and fashion. In his essay
“Le Peintre de la vie moderne”he describes the psychology of the city dweller and the city
experience which challenge the contemporary artist. Baudelaire gave his definition of
modernity (la modernité) before modernism as an art movement came into being: for him
modernity meant the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent. This modernity is half of art, of
which the other part is the eternal and the immutable:
La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont
l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable. (Baudelaire 1968, 131)
Baudelaire defines the city’s modernity through a figure which he calls flâneur, an artist and
observer of the city life, whose aim is to derive “the eternal from transitory”and to see “the
poetic in the historic.” (Butler 1994, 133) But how well the definition of modernity by
Baudelaire describes the aspirations of modernist writers? In the present study I will also
reflect this aspect of modernity in Virginia Woolf and see how her work represents the
Baudelairean notion of modernity.
16
City life has been depicted from many different perspectives. Already urban novelists
such as Dickens and Zola demonstrated their mastery of the interrelationships between
groups in the city, but their city was rather like a village. On the other hand, Rilke in The
Notebooks of Malte Laurid’s Brigge (1910) describes his hero’s reflections on Paris who can
only find “solace” in a reminder of country life. But Rilke is also concerned by the
Baudelairean isolated and divided psychology. This subjective experience in the town and its
effects upon the consciousness is central to philosophers, writers and painters from Bergson
to Joyce and Woolf. (Butler 1994, 134) Virginia Woolf describes the urban experience in
Mrs Dalloway by using different techniques to represent the fragmentary nature of city life,
e.g. simultaneity and the montage techniques, which will be discussed in detail later in this
study.
According to Malcolm Bradbury, modernist art has had special relations with the
modern city, both as cultural museum and as novel environment. Modernist writing has a
strong tendency to depict experience within the city and therefore the city-novel and the
city-poem have become one of its main forms. Among the city-novels are for instance
Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Döblin’s Berlin
Alexanderplatz, Hesse’s Steppenwolf, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Sartre’s
Nausea and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. As this list of authors from different countries
representing modern city life hints, modernist urbanism was more than any one city.
Modernism was an international movement and therefore the distillation of many capitals
and nations. (Bradbury 1978a, 96-103) Among the cities of modernism are St. Petersburg,
Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Chicago, New York, Paris and London. The bohemian city life of
Baudelaire’s Paris is very different from Virginia Woolf’s London in Mrs Dalloway. Woolf’s
London rather corresponds with the description of London given by Bradbury as one of the
17
dullest capital cities: “one with no real artistic community, no true centres, no coteries, no
cafés, a metropolis given to commerce and an insular middle-class life-style either indifferent
or implacably hostile to the new arts”(Bradbury 1978b, 172). Woolf’s attitude, or that of her
characters, towards the city in her narratives is not hostile. As Michael Whitworth suggests
(2000, 153), throughout Woolf’s work the city is associated with life and love. The
respectable and orderly London city life is celebrated in Mrs Dalloway:
In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the
carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass
bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some
aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June (MD, 6)
Unlike T. S. Eliot, as Whitworth (ibid. 153-4) puts it, “Woolf’s characters and focalisers do
not dwell on sordidness, and they present beauty not as something existing in spite of urban
life, but as emerging from its energy and motion.”
The same suspicious attitude as concerns the definition of modernism is to be found
in the attempts to define the era of modernism among literary critics. As Faulkner (1977, 13)
suggests, “any ascription to cultural movements is bound to be arbitrary.” He himself
chooses to limit the literary modernism in his discussion to the two decades 1910-1930. The
change to modernism was not sudden and it had its predecessors in the nineteenth century,
e.g. Gustave Flaubert, Edgar Allan Poe or the French Symbolists, who may in many regards
be considered the forefathers of the twentieth century modernists. According to Michael Bell
(1999, 9) the peak period of modernism in the Anglo-American context is between 1910 and
1925. Marjorie Perloff argues that not all that has been called modernist art is modernist in
the avant-garde sense. Perloff emphasizes that the avant-garde phase of modernism was
18
short-lived and she wants to separate the early modernist “Project”from later “modernist”
conservatism, formalism and the suspect politics of such modernists as Eliot, Auden, Randall
Jarrell and the Robert Lowell of Lord Weary’s Castle (1947). (Perloff 2002, 2-3)
Usually the 1920’s, the period called high modernism, 2 has been considered an
important decade in literary modernism. Also Virginia Woolf wrote most of her modernist
works in that decade. As I mentioned above, she also wrote literary criticism and many of her
texts, especially A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Quineas (1938), have inspired
contemporary feminist theory and are frequently quoted in literary criticism today. She also
wrote an essay called “Modern Fiction”(1919) which may be regarded as an early theory of
modernism, though Woolf herself was against rigid theory and hostile towards closed
systems (Faulkner 1977, 33). Although Woolf’s theoretical essays should not be thought as
an explanation of her fiction or her critical views identified with her intentions and
achievements as a novelist, they may furnish new ideas among researchers and critics. For
instance the following often quoted passage from Modern Fiction describes well the
impressionism of the modernist novel including Woolf’s own fiction:
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a
myriad impressions
trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of
steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they
fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a
writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he
must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there
2
High modernism is the period immediately surrounding The First World War and as a literary phenomenon is
strictly limited to certain figures (Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce) who share some
particular formal and conceptual characteristics (Brooks 1991, 119).
19
would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the
accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn as the Bond Street tailors would
have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo,
a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to
the end. (Woolf 1966, 106)
This passage describes the new freedom that the modernist novel had taken in depicting the
inner reality of the mind which differed from the depiction of external reality of the Realist
novels of the nineteenth century. Likewise, in the nineteenth century the Impressionists such
as Monet and Cezanne grew away from the Realist painting when they refused to paint
meticulously the outward appearances of things in order to give an illusion of reality. The
Impressionist painters took liberty to express their personality in the paintings more than the
tradition of realistic painting made it possible. Thus there can be detected an analogous
development both in literature and painting, a development which started a little earlier in
painting. Impressionism was also a literary practice, but it was less important than
Impressionism in painting. 3
Both Impressionism and Symbolism were important to the development of the
modernist novel. According to Clive Scott (1978, 206), the symbolist revolution awakened
an acute consciousness of language. ”Symbolism contains within itself a shift from a
3
Impressionism is “[… ] a literary practice which does not stress reality but rather the impressions of the author
(or one of his characters). Impressionism may also be defined as an artistic theory which claims that the
dominant purpose of literature is to explain effects upon intellect, feelings, and conscience rather than provide
detailed descriptions of objective settings and events. Impressionism is a personal style of writing in which the
author develops characters and paints scenes as they appear to him at a given moment rather than as they are (or
may be) in actuality.”(Shaw 1972, 198)
20
romantic to a modernly ironic aesthetic,”he adds and detects some things in common with
Impressionism and Symbolism. Quoting Scott:
The vision of the Symbolist and the Decadent has accustomed us to the sensorily acute
begetting the semantically or modally indefinite. It is typical of Verlaine, for instance,
to apprehend things sharply but to see them only just, to catch distinct voices and cries
which coalesce in the monotony of lament and under the sedation of memory. This
must suggest comparison with Impressionism, with a way of building up a unified
impression of light (or meaning or mood) by first breaking the subject down into
specific energy-filled fragments. What drew Monet to the river at Argenteuil and the
sea at Antibes was the fact that water acted as a prism and broke light up into its
primary colours. The brush-stroke when seen from close-up looks bright and
unambiguous, but from a distance and in the overall picture, it is nothing more than a
half-tint. (Ibid. 218-219)
Also Arnold Hauser (1977, 183) points out that it is often difficult to distinguish Symbolism
from Impressionism, for the two concepts are partly antithetical and partly synonymous. For
example, Hauser suggests that even though there is a sharp distinction between Verlaine’s
Impressionism and Mallarmé’s symbolism, it is not so simple to find the proper stylistic
category for a writer like Maeterlinck. “Symbolism,”as Hauser writes (ibid.) “represents, on
the other hand, the final result of the development which began with romanticism, that is,
with the discovery of metaphor as the germ-cell of poetry [… ].”
The Impressionist painters, like the stream-of-consciousness writers, were interested in
catching a fleeting moment. In the modernist novel the study of the moment is concentrated
around the concept epiphanic instant, which is familiar from the works of Joyce, Faulkner
(see Orr 1991, 622-623), and Virginia Woolf. Also photography is connected with
Impressionism and the epiphanic moment: the role of light is important both in photography
21
and Impressionist paintings and the photographer’s momentary vision is as contingent as the
painters’impression or the modernist writers’epiphanic moment.
Symbolism4, on the other hand, has been associated with such things as dreams and
visions, mystic experiences and androgyny (Dempsey 2003, 41). Many critics have
mentioned the influence of Édouard Dujardin’s symbolist novel Les Lauriers sont coupées
(1888) on James Joyce (cf. Drabble, 1985, 956; Friedman 1981, 454-6) and Virginia Woolf,
for instance his experiments on psychological time and narrative point of view, his discovery
of interior monologue which later became a familiar modernist mode, and his way of writing
a novel with less stress on event and character than with the accumulation of image and
symbolic device (Friedman 1981, 455-456). The French symbolist poets, such as Paul
Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud, created personal symbols in their musical
poetry and painters followed their example (Dempsey 2003, 41). 5 We can find the use of
personal symbols also in To the Lighthouse and The Waves.
Many modernist writers used myth as a means to juxtapose the present and the past. T.
S. Eliot talked about a mythical method which could be used instead of a narrative method.
According to Eliot (1965, 681) the mythical method “is simply a way of controlling, of
ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy which is contemporary history.”Yeats used his personal myths of gyres and cyclical
history, and Eliot employed the fertility myths in The Waste Land (Whitworth 2000, 155-
4
The term is widely applied, but in its most useful and restricted sense refers to the period c. 1880–1895
(Drabble 1985, 956).
5
French Symbolists are important in the background of Surrealism, and their influence is evident also in
contemporary drama and brief fiction and in the novel since Flaubert. D. Hayman has shown the significant
influence of Mallarmé on Finnegan’s Wake, and Fiser identifies Marcel Proust as the greatest Symbolist of all
(see Preminger 1979, 837). The Symbolist literary movement exercised an influence on painting (Odilon Redon,
Gustave Moreau) and on a wide range of twentieth-century writers, including Pound, T.S. Eliot, W. Stevens,
Yeats, Joyce, V. Woolf, Claudel, Valery, Stefan George and Rilke (Drabble 1985, 956).
22
156). Eliot used Joyce’s Ulysses to exemplify the mythical method, but according to
Whitworth (ibid.) he understated Joyce’s sense of comic or ironic discrepancies between
myth and contemporary history, between the Homeric hero Odysseus and the advertising
salesman Leopold Bloom. Whitworth implies that with his mythic method Eliot represented
a conservative view of history in which the lives of every generation are fundamentally the
same. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, was more liberal and progressive than many of her
modernist contemporaries, and, therefore, she did not consistently present the past as being
more orderly than the present. It is true, as Whitworth suggests (ibid. 156), that in all her
experimental work Woolf inserts glimpses of prehistory, but to her prehistory and myth are
not identical. Woolf’s primeval glimpses do not compose a narrative, but as Whitworth
suggests, they function as interrogatives, questioning not only “civilization”but also mythic
modernism, without providing any answers.
In the modernist novel the influences of contemporary science and philosophy are
clearly discernible: Freud for the interest in the human psyche, Einstein and Bergson for an
altered conception of time and place, Nietzsche for the pessimistic nihilism that is to be seen
for instance in the works of Kafka. Henri Bergson’s influence has been particularly
significant for the stream-of-consciousness novel, whose major representatives are Marcel
Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Especially Bergson’s concept of mind time called
durée (‘duration’) affected the literary techniques. Durée is “the Bergsonian view of the
present as composed of all the past that is present to consciousness, in a mixture of
interpenetrating states of mental being”(Butler 1994, 158). The new attitudes toward time at
the beginning of the twentieth century were also reflected in the simultanist techniques of
literature and art which were central to the modernism of the pre-war period (ibid.) For
instance in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway different places or different incidents taking
23
place at the same time are being juxtaposed, or they are being seen from different
perspectives at the same time.
Language is of utmost importance in modernist fiction. The revolution in literary
techniques most clearly separates the modernist novel from the traditional realist novel.
David Lodge (1978, 481) has been looking for generalizations about the language of modern
fiction and has found the following features. It is experimental and innovatory in form, it is
much concerned with consciousness (also with the subconscious and unconscious workings
of the human mind), the structure of external objective events is diminished in scope and
scale, or presented obliquely and selectively, in order to make room for introspection,
analysis, reflection and reverie. The modern novel has no real beginning, its ending is usually
open or ambiguous, the weakening of narrative structure and unity are compensated by other
modes of aesthetic ordering such as allusion to or imitation of literary models, or mythical
archetypes; or repetition-with-variation of motifs, images, symbols, a technique often called
rhythm, leitmotif, or spatial form. Modern fiction eschews the straight chronological
ordering of its material, and the use of a reliable, omniscient narrator; it employs, instead, a
single, limited point of view, or multiple viewpoints, and it tends toward a complex or fluid
handling of time, involving much cross-reference back and forward across the temporal span
of the action. (Ibid.) Most of these features can be found in Virginia Woolf’s modernist
novels, but of special interest to my study are the features concerning images, symbols,
multiple point of views, complex handling of time and spatial form. These features are
related to the discussion on the relationship of her fiction to the visual arts.
According to Maria Dibattista (2000, 129), in comparison with James Joyce’s texts
Woolf’s prose is poetic in the classical sense and retains the level of “meaning” as an
important element, while Joyce often uses in Ulysses rough language, the language of those
24
grown up in the streets. For Joyce language was an end in itself. He experimented with all
types of sentences, long and short, dialogues, inserted French and Latin words and phrases,
meaningless repetitive words, notes of a song (ibid.). Joyce obviously wanted to shock and
question the traditional way of writing, whereas Virginia Woolf, as Dibattista points out,
might be characterized as a conservative in her use of language, most of all because she never,
unlike Joyce, played with the material form of words, nor did she create anagrams or
neologisms. Her language is literary language that avoids colloquialisms, slang or
specialized jargon of scientific or social elites. (Ibid.)
The structures of Woolf’s novels are carefully planned and original and each novel has
its individual shape with multiple meanings. Even the apparently structurally simple novels
Mrs Dalloway and Between the Acts contain patterns which reveal careful planning by the
author. Mrs Dalloway has a one-day structure which folds round Clarissa’s party, the climax
of the novel. In Between the Acts the play is a device that structures the novel. In To the
Lighthouse and The Waves, which are composed of different narrative sections, the structures
create symbolic connotations with different meanings in the reader’s mind. As Eric Warner
(1987, 51) points out, “criticism has not yet begun to do justice to the structural complexity of
these works, reinforced as they are by a dense network of interlocking images, phrases,
allusions, quotations and other linguistic devices.”
Woolf writes in the third person even when she expresses the thoughts of a character
thus using a narrative voice to represent the character’s thoughts and perceptions. This kind
of text and sentence do not represent the “real” stream-of-consciousness, but is a
modification of the thought processes which should be narrated in the first person if they
were meant to imitate people’s thoughts realistically. According to Friedman (1975, 153),
25
Woolf uses a technique called multiple selective omniscience 6 . It is a technique which
creates an illusion that the character is talking in the first person and in the present tense,
although grammatically it may be related in the third person, past tense. In fact, Woolf uses a
mixture of first and third person, present and past tense (ibid. 155). Maria Dibattista (2000,
132) has paid attention to the fact that Virginia Woolf merges the distinct “voice of the
author,”in other words, the voice of the narrative person, with a language “voiced”by no
one the reader can easily identify. Her fiction also combines different writing styles, such as
poetic passages (the interludes in The Waves, To the Lighthouse), dramatic monologues (The
Waves), as well as the representation of the characters’thoughts.
There is one feature which makes Woolf’s fiction particularly modern, i.e. her way of
combining features of poetry and prose in her novels. This mixture of different stylistic
features is especially conspicuous in two of her novels, To the Lighthouse and The Waves,
but in the latter novel she “borrows” also from drama the dialogic form and the stage
instructions (i.e. the interludes). Both novels contain poetic passages, interludes which are
separated from the rest of the narration. In The Waves the interludes are marked with italics
and in To the Lighthouse the interlude composes a chapter of its own in the middle of the
novel. The style of the interlude in the latter novel differs from the style of the rest of the book:
it is written in a dramatic fashion using means of poetry, even though it may be
predominantly characterized as prose. In the interlude Woolf uses repetition, for example by
repeating the word ‘together’in the following sentence, thereby creating poetic rhythms: “At
length, desisting, all ceased together, gathered together, all sighed together; all together
6
Selective omniscience differs from normal omniscience in that in the latter all is seen through the sensibility of
the authorial narrator and when he chooses to clip into the minds of his characters, he reports what he sees there
in terms of his own idiom and awareness (Friedman 1975, 153).
26
gave off an aimless gust of lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied; swung
wide; admitted nothing; and slammed to.”(TL, 145) On the same page it is possible to find
consonantal alliteration, another poetic device: “The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take
on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters
on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian
sands”(ibid.). Also her vocabulary and the combination of words refer to poetry, e.g. “the
gust of lamentation”; “divine goodness;”“the chaos and tumult of the night;”“when dawn
trembles and night pauses;” “feather-light fingers.” The repetition of consonants, “cool
cathedral caves,”“bones bleach and bow,”“flash of tattered flags”create rhythmic patterns
within the sentence. Woolf’s language has an air of classical poetry in its metaphoricity,
alliteration, harmony, and rhythm. Although she is a modernist who breaks many
conventions of the Realist novel, she nevertheless continues the traditions of classical
literature as well.
Closest to poetry Virginia Woolf came in her most experimental novel The Waves. The
novel, unlike her previous novels Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, does
not depict life or human consciousness “realistically,”but as a highly stylized work of art it
approaches “abstraction.”It is almost impossible for the reader to form a coherent picture of
the characters or the “events,” because the novel is composed of lines spoken by the
characters in a random order, without the support of a plot or illustrations and comments by
the narrator like in a traditional novel. The rhythmic alteration of different elements, i.e. the
monologues of the characters and the interludes, give structural consistency to the novel and
keep it together. In The Waves Woolf not only combines poetry and prose, but also prose and
drama. In this novel we are not reading the characters’thoughts, but listening to their
soliloquies which they often speak in the first person like in a play:
27
‘I see a ring,’said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’
‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple
stripe.’
‘I hear a sound, ‘said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and
down.’
‘I see a globe,’said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks
of some hill.’
‘I see a crimson tassel,’said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold threads.’
‘I hear something stamping,’said Louis. ‘A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps,
and stamps, and stamps.’(W, 1977, 7)
James Naremore (1973, 158) argues that all the characters in The Waves speak like
phrase-makers, and all the language in the book has the same sensitivity to rhythm and
metaphor, repetition and alliteration, even sometimes the same use of rhyme, euphony and
assonance. Michael Rosenthal (1979, 146), on the other hand, disagrees with Naremore by
saying that the languages in the interludes and soliloquies are entirely different, and I think he
is right in pointing out that the language of the interludes is richly metaphoric and suggestive,
whereas that is not the case with the soliloquies. Even though the sentences of the soliloquies
in The Waves are usually rather simple and “ordinary,”and written in the form of statements
like in a spoken language, there is, nevertheless, a touch of lyricism in the text. The speeches
of the six protagonists give the impression of a magic verse or incantation going on endlessly
and rhythmically like the waves of the ocean.
Rhythm is a feature of Woolf’s language and thus her novels may be characterized as
rhythmic prose. As J. Hillis Miller (1983, 168) argues, Virginia Woolf’s style is
characterized by the “prolonged sustained rhythmical movement, drawing breath again just
when it seems about to stop, and continuing beyond a semicolon or even a full stop or the
28
numbering or naming of a new section.”As James Naremore points out (1973, 17), Virginia
Woolf had expressed many times her desire to make her prose “more” poetic and more
feminine, her wish to adapt the book to the body. Naremore, therefore, suggests that lyric
poetry had more of the female way of seeing and that Woolf’s prose, when she was in her
more poetic mood, has “a mannered rhythm and a slightly ornamental imagery.”
Before Virginia Woolf wrote her feminist essays, as Randall Stevenson (1992, 41)
points out, Dorothy Richardson’s novel The Pilgrimage (1915-38) was concerned with
women’s independence and the rejection of restraining social conventions, as well as the
rejection of the conventions of fiction. Richardson was sceptical of male-dominated
conventions in fiction and was seeking a feminine equivalent of masculine realism.
Richardson’s fluid stream-of-consciousness was her version of this feminine prose.
Richardson achieves a truer realism by presenting the freely associative thoughts of her
protagonist Miriam. Also Virginia Woolf’s views in A Room of One’s Own suggest that the
male structuring of society and civilization encourage women to split off in consciousness
from the external world. According to Woolf, a room of their own is for women easier to
establish in the private domain of the mind. (Ibid. 41-42) As Randall Stevenson suggests (ibid.
42), “women writers, such as Richardson and Woolf, may thus have been especially disposed
to develop new narrative forms in which the workings of consciousness, split away from the
external reality and the object world, could be fruitfully sustained and explored.”
29
2. Virginia Woolf and Visual Modernism
There exist many views on the question of which art schools are included under the heading
of modernism. Does modernism start from Impressionism or not? In my study I have
included Impressionism in modernism. More intresting than the definition of modernism in
terms of different –isms is, however, to look at the important general issues that distinguish
modernist art from non-modernist art, traditional art and the art forms which modern art set
out to question and rebel against.
The most blatant issue which modernist artists questioned was the principle of reality
illusion that had for centuries been the foremost principle in pictorial art. As Arnold Hauser
(1977, 217) points out, there had always been a swinging to and fro between formalism and
anti-formalism, but the function of art being true to life and faithful to nature had never been
questioned in principle since the Middle Ages. Hauser proposes that Impressionism was the
climax and the end of a development which had lasted more than four hundred years, and that
Post-Impressionism first renounced all illusion of reality. Post-Impressionism was the great
reactionary movement of the century whose aim was the rejection of Impressionism. In
Hauser’s view Impressionism prepares the ground for the development of deliberate
deformation of natural objects by not aspiring to an integrating description of reality. (Ibid.)
Impressionism was a rebellion against the realist academic tradition in art the same
way as the modernist novel was a rebellion against the traditional realist novel. Virginia
Woolf protested against the conventional novel which she thought not to represent life in the
right way by offering the readers the obligatory elements of plot, comedy, tragedy, love
interest, and characters dressed according to the latest fashion (Woolf 1966b, 106).
Impressionism was looking for a greater freedom of expression, as well as trying to find a
30
more “real”reality through a different attitude to perception by the artist. The artist did not
see any more what he/she was supposed to see: he/she saw the world through the mind’s eye,
an impression of reality.
In Cubism the issue of representation becomes problematic because the theory of
Cubism is in deep contrast with the actual Cubist works. The theory of Cubism is based upon
such principles as an “accurate representation of reality”and an “impulse towards realism”
(Hintikka 1982, 11). As Jaakko Hintikka suggests, these claims appear unbelievable, because
Cubist paintings distort human figures and objects and represent them as geometrical forms,
which are hard to conceive as accurate representations of reality. The contradiction between
theory and practice is not so tremendous as it first seems, since in Cubists’work, as Hintikka
explains, there is a spirit of concreteness, solidity and plasticity (ibid.). Also, as I understand
it, Cubism may be seen as a contrary movement to modernist art with spiritual aims such as
Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract paintings. Hintikka proposes that Cubism may be seen as an
analogue to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, even though he refuses the thought that
these movements were influenced by each other. Hintikka points out, however, that from a
historical perspective both these movements were reactions to the same kind of earlier
currents. Cubism was partly a reaction against Impressionism, and phenomenology a
reaction against positivism and phenomenalism. Picasso has been told to have said that he
does not paint objects as they look like, but as he knows them to be (ibid.). In other words,
Picasso painted the ideas of things in his mind, not their actual appearance.
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) marks the beginning of Cubism
(1907-1914), the most influential art movement of the twentieth century. During the second
stage of Cubism, known as analytical Cubism (c. 1910-1912), Bracque and Picasso analyzed
objects so thoroughly that they became almost unrecognizable. Their pictures were nearly
31
monochromatic, usually restricted to brown and grey, so that matters of form received the
viewer’s primary attention. Analytical Cubism is a watershed in the development of modern
painting because it invents a new kind of pictorial space. Cubists replaced the old tradition of
deep perspective by a shallow space in which the distance between figure and background
diminishes or disappears altogether. Thus Cubism introduces a new way of representing
three-dimensional objects, when the painter could show the back and the front of a chair at
the same time or paint a face with one eye viewed frontally and the other in profile. (McLeod
1999, 200)
Glen McLeod points out that a great deal of modernist experimentation in both poetry
and prose was inspired to some extent by Cubism (McLeod 1999, 200). McLeod mentions
the Cubist techniques of fragmentation, multiple perspectives and juxtaposition as part of the
standard modernist repertoire, which also Virginia Woolf uses in her experimental novels.
Woolf’s novels may be seen also in the context of the Symbolist legacy, but unlike many
Symbolists and the theosophical mysticism and spiritualism of Wassily Kandinsky, Woolf’s
symbolism is of secular nature, which in my reading is nearer to Freud’s psychology of the
unconscious.
After the Cubists came other artists who questioned illusionism and representation in
art. The Surrealist René Magritte used literalism to question representational realism. In his
famous painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This Is not a Pipe, 1926) Magritte explores the
relationship between words and things. Magritte engages in a critique of visual language, as
James Harkness (1982, 5) notes in his introduction to an English translation of Michel
Foucault’s essay on Magritte This Is not a Pipe. Harkness explains how Magritte’s
philosophy concerns with Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory on the arbitrariness of the sign, the
conventional nature of the bond between the signifier and the signified (ibid.). Magritte uses
32
in his painting both text and image, and by means of words refuses the principle of illusion
which is otherwise apparent in his realistically painted images. Magritte’s paintings are
studies on the nature and philosophy of art rather than images depicting the world. Similarly,
we could think that Woolf’s novel The Waves is a critique of the novelistic language and the
conventional narrative, because Woolf has discarded many conventions of novelistic art.
Woolf is questioning the novelistic means, procedures and techniques by replacing them with
new ones, but is she also questioning the principle of fiction itself?
The artists were enthusiastic with new possibilities opened up by photography.
Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell belonged to the first generation of women who were active
photographers and cinema-goers from childhood. During the years from Woolf’s birth in
1882 to the publication of her essay “The Cinema”in 1926, 7 photography became a career
option for women and more than 3500 American women worked as professional
photographers. Many women photographers trained as painters, but also many exhibited as
amateurs. Women were active domestic photographers and actively contributing to the
modernist photographic movements “The Photo-Secession” and “The Bauhaus”. (Humm
2002, 18-19) Unlike public photography, snapshots in photo albums are readable only in
context of family history and psycho-biography. As Maggie Humm (2002, 19) points out,
metaphorically photo albums and the darkroom may be called “rooms of women’s own”and
modernist women’s concern with “the ephemera of daily life” allows to explore the
underlying psychic meanings that shape daily lives.
In her diaries Virginia Woolf writes about her visit to the cinema as early as 1915
7
Woolf’s essay “The Cinema”appeared originally in different versions in The Arts (June 1926) and The Nation
and the Atheneum (3 August 1926) as “The Cinema”and under the “Movies and Reality”in New Republic (4
August 1926) (Humm 2002, 187).
33
(Woolf 1977, 28), and later visits to see films by René Clair whose experiments with spatial
and temporal dislocations influenced Woolf’s own techniques (see Humm 2002, 76). In
Berlin in 1929 Virginia Woolf together with her sister Vanessa saw Pudovkin’s Storm over
Asia, banned in England by the British Board of Film Censors. Vanessa enjoyed the film in
purely visual terms, for its display of landscape and old Mongolian types (Spalding 1984,
228).
According to Humm (2002, 76), Woolf’s own writings about cinema “have a
keen-eyed modernist vision. In “The Cinema”Woolf understands well cinematic language
which in her opinion differs from the devices used by literature. According to her, in cinema
“eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples, whereas in
literature the brain knows a character, for example Anna Karenina, “inside of her mind.”In
cinema all the emphasis is on her teeth, her pearls and her velvet.”Woolf also plays attention
to the use of visual symbols and metonymies in films: “A kiss is love. A broken cup is
jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse”(Woolf 1966b, 270). We may read Woolf
depicting the effectiveness of a moving camera, montage and a close-up, though she does not
use these terms in her essay, as she is describing how at a performance of Doctor Caligari a
shadow shaped like a tadpole appeared suddenly at one corner of the screen and how it
“swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged, and sank back again into nonentity”(ibid.).
With this example Woolf wanted to pay attention to the possibilities of cinema to express
emotions through visual symbols.
Both photography and Impressionism were involved in capturing a moment of reality
and creating the effects of spontaneity and randomness. With Impressionism the role of the
spectator in the creation of a work of art grew in importance and the freedom of interpretation
started to play a bigger role in art, especially later in the twentieth century (cf. the “death of
34
the author”theory of Barthes). After Impressionism came other movements to continue the
development towards greater freedom of expression which Impressionism had started. These
new tendencies became known by the name Post-Impressionism. The term was coined by the
British artist and critic Roger Fry who arranged an exhibition of French art Manet and the
Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in London from November 1910 to January
1911. The exhibition included about 150 works and among the artists were Gauguin, van
Gogh, Cézanne, Denis, Derain, Manet, Matisse, Picasso, Redon, Rouault, Sérusier, Seurat,
Signac, Valloton and Vlaminck. These artists were called by the names of
Neo-Impressionists,
Synthetists,
the
Nabis,
Symbolists
and
Fauvists.
In
fact,
Post-Impressionism was not a uniform movement, but a large notion used of art that Fry saw
as either descending from Impressionism or being against it. (Dempsey 2002, 45)
Significant in this context is that the exhibition had an immediate effect on the British
artists and writers, most of whom belonged to the Bloomsbury group. The second
Post-Impressionist exhibition held in London in 1912 included a British department with the
works by Vanessa Bell, Spencer Gore, Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis and Roger Fry.
(Dempsey 2002, 48) Cézanne influenced Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant by liberating their
art and inspiring them to concentrate on the tactile subjects of their immediate world, still
lifes, portraits of friends and familiar landscapes (Thomson 1998, 66). Although the
influence of these English artists in Britain amounted to little and none of them had disciples,
the influence of the Bloomsbury group on taste was far-reaching, because the group had
contacts within high society, literature, journalism, museums and politics. The discovery of
Post-Impressionism was part of their challenge to established conventions, social beliefs and
sexual repressions. (Ibid. 61)
35
In his article “The French Post-Impressionists,” later published in the collection of
essays Vision and Design (1920), Roger Fry analyzes the French works of art in the first
Post-Impressionist exhibition held in London. He points out, for example, that the
Post-Impressionists did not attempt “to imitate form, but to create form, nor to imitate life,
but to find an equivalent for life.”In fact, they did not aim “at illusion, but at reality”(Fry
1961, 190). Fry also notes how Picasso in his later works created a purely abstract language
of form and thus gave up all resemblance to natural form. He pays attention to Matisse’s
entirely new use of colour and the decorative unity of design, as well as the influence of
Chinese art on his painting.
Virginia Woolf was closely in touch with the art world, not only through her sister
Vanessa, but also through her Bloomsbury connections, especially Roger Fry whose essays
she read and discussed with him. Sue Roe (2000, 169) argues that Vanessa Bell’s painting A
Conversation (1913-1916), which depicts three women seated together at a window, had an
influence on Woolf’s writing. This painting, her conversations with the painters and writers
at the time together with Fry’s lectures on aesthetic form inspired new ideas on experiments
in writing. Vanessa Bell has been reported to have noticed the closeness between Woolf’s
story “Kew Gardens”and her painting Three Women (another name of A Conversation) in
their design and form. The story depicts the colours and lights seen from the interior of a
flower-bed. (Ibid.)
In Virginia Woolf’s fiction, reflections of Symbolist art may be found in symbolism,
androgyny, and the correspondences between the arts. The Symbolists were inspired by
ancient myths and adopted the idea of androgyny from these myths. Duality between the
feminine and the masculine principle interested Woolf especially in the novel Orlando, and
to some extent in To the Lighthouse. Although Symbolism is chiefly associated with France,
36
it is also an international movement and such diverse artists as Edward Burne-Jones and
Edward Munch are regarded as Symbolists (Chilvers and Osborne 1988, 484). The
Symbolist painting is often imaginary, mythical, or religious, and thus often distant from
Virginia Woolf’s novels, but the work of some Symbolist artists (or those who called
themselves Symbolists) may be compared with her fiction, for instance paintings by Edward
Munch, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, as I am going to demonstrate in the present
study (see ch. 6).
On 11 April 1910 the manifesto of the Futurist painters Giacomo Balla, Umberto
Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini promised to show the frenetic life of
the great cities and the exciting psychology of night life. For the Futurist the city means
subversion of the museum-bound culture of the past, and the crowd of the city fascinates him.
Futurist paintings depicting city life include Gino Severini’s Le Boulevard (1911) which, as
Christopher Butler explains, “shows strollers through the city as united by the pervasive
rhythms of its triangular construction.”(Butler 1994, 137-141) Cubism and Futurism shared
an interest in the representation of simultaneity and duration, and the influence of Bergson’s
philosophy is related to the art of these movements (Dempsey 2002, 85-89). Futurists were
also inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs which studied the movements of people
and animals, and the French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs inspired
Giacomo Balla to attempt to represent movement in painting (ibid, 89).
According to Robert Atkins (1997, 83), Cubism assumed a more conceptual approach
that regarded painting as a subjective response to the world. Cubists analyzed space and form
by breaking objects into fragments and were interested in depicting an object from multiple
perspectives. Modern urban experience fascinated many artists at the time and the term
simultaneity, an aspect of the cult of the modern, was coined. For the poet Jules Romain it
37
meant the common immediate experiences of the teeming metropolis that bound its
inhabitants together. (Ibid.) As Atkins notes (1997, 194), the shifting viewpoints indicating
the passage of time and the term ‘simultaneity’in Cubist and Futurist art seem to some
observers convey Einstein’s thinking. On the other hand, the term simultaneity was
employed by both the Futurists and Einstein to suggest the impossibility of the “now.”This,
however, may be a coincidence, as Atkins (ibid. 195) suggests, for Einstein’s theories were
entirely unknown to the artists at the time. Thus we may say that as much as Einstein’s theory,
Cubist and Futurist art convey the frenetic pace and fragmented look of the modern city.
Atkins, however, does not mention the influence of Bergson’s philosophy of time on the
contemporary artists and writers as Christopher Butler does in his work Early Modernism:
Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916 (1994, 142) and as I do in this study.
The engineering marvels such as the Eiffel Tower and the aeroplane fascinated the artists at
the turn of the century (Atkins 1997, 194-195).
In Robert Delaunay’s painting Eiffel Tour (1910) the juxtaposed views of the tower
suggest its simultaneous visibility to all the city’s inhabitants (Cottington 1998, 48-49). We
can detect the same kind of interest in the collective experience shared by its inhabitants in
the metropolis of London and the representation of simultaneous experiences in Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway. Woolf was also an urban artist who shared the Futurists’interest in movement,
new machines, technology and the need to express the dynamism of the modern city. “In her
juxtaposition of modernity and the machine,”as Michael Whitworth suggests (2000, 155),
“Woolf curiously and unexpectedly resembles the Italian Futurists, who celebrated the car,
the train and the aeroplane; curiously, as she certainly had felt uncomfortable with their
pro-war, pro-fascist posturing.”The antifeminism and elitism of some of the Futurists who
survived the First World War led to their absorption into Fascism (Atkins 1997, 111). This
38
antifeminism of the Futurists is in deep contrast with Virginia Woolf’s feminism and this is a
feature of Futurism that I do not want to associate with her thinking. Nevertheless, the
Futurists, as Butler (1994, 137) suggests, were the most important of the avant-garde groups
in whose work life in the modern city was central, and the enthusiastic attitude towards
modern city life with its crowd, city architecture and modern technology was shared also by
Woolf.
Women painters and writers met many obstacles and prejudices in their careers. The
Impressionists Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt have been given in art history almost
exclusively gendered readings and their work has been characterized with such words as
“feminine charm”and “womanliness”(see e.g. Thomas 1975, 55, 77) Female painters were
often treated as amateurs, which is also the experience of the artist Lily Brisoe in To the
Lighthouse. As Lily’s work is underestimated, her self-esteem is so injured that she will
never even attempt to display her work in public. Woolf chose to depict woman artist as an
amateur, even though she could have presented her as a professional. Woolf perhaps made
Lily Briscoe an amateur to show how difficult it is to become a female artist in a
male-dominated society and to show what prejudices and hostile attitudes a woman artist has
to confront.
In her study Impressionism. A Feminist Reading. The Gendering of Art, Science and
Nature in the Nineteenth Century (1991) Norma Broude takes up the practice in art historical
writing of gendering eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century styles of painting. According
to Broude (1991, 14), Impressionism, with its colorism and diffuse drawing, was described
by conservative writers in the 1880s and 1890s as a “feminine”style of painting. They also
regarded the Impressionist painter’s relationship to nature as a “passive attitude toward
nature.”In the twentieth century criticism this conception of the “feminine”attitude and style
39
of painting were replaced by a contradictory discourse of Impressionism which saw it in
scientific or masculine terms. Recent art history, as Broude notes (1991, 16), has begun to
emphasize the role of “subjectivity,”not only in the art of the Impressionists but also in for
example the Realist art of Courbet. Richard Shiff (1984, 7) has argued that Symbolism and
Impressionism, as understood around 1890, were not antithetical but rather seen in terms of
“subjectivity.”As Broude (ibid. 15) points out, the gendering of art began with Romanticism
which appropriated feminine subjectivity for the arts. This kind of gendering of art, science
and nature is part of patriarchal culture and it should be questioned and criticized, as
Broude’s work suggests. It may, however, be used for example as a strategy of interpretation
which I will apply in my analysis of the “feminine”modernism in the final part of the present
study.
My method aims at a tactical insistence on sexual difference by looking at the
“otherness” of modernism which has been gendered male in art history. This strategy
suggested by Griselda Pollock seeks ways in which the difference of the feminine functions
not only as an alternative but a dialectical method of releasing us from the binary trap
represented by gender (see Wolff 2003, 88). In my analysis of the female artists I am not
only paying attention to “the feminine”in their art, but also introducing the work of women
artists that have received less attention in art historical accounts than their male colleagues.
40
PART TWO
TIME AND SPACE
3. The Momentary Impression
Impressionism was a school of painting born in the 1860s in France as a rebellion against
both academic and romantic painting. Its aim was to capture momentary impressions of
lights, movements and colours. The Impressionists opposed Romanticism’s notion of art
according to which art conveys the artist’s feelings and the observation of nature is of
secondary importance. The Impressionist painter wanted to depict fragments of reality in an
impersonal manner, like a photographer who captures reality by means of a camera.
(Hosiaisluoma 2003, 347-348)
An Impressionist painting is often a landscape, a city view or a portrait. It has been
painted intentionally in such a way that it looks blurred, and the painstakingly painted details,
which are important in a Realist painting, are left out. The Impressionists used theories of
colour and light in order to create more natural, even scientifically correct effects of light.
This atomistic observation of the world produces, in fact, no more realistic pictures than the
Realists’way of painting. The representatives of both schools used certain conventions to
create certain kinds of pictures of reality that were linked to the historical and cultural
situation of the period of their creation. According to the art historian Richard Shiff (1984,
13), in the accounts of Impressionism presented by art historians of the twentieth century the
emphasis on objective truth and the association of Impressionism with “positivism” or
“Comtean positivism” oversimplifies and distorts the Impressionist notion of “truth.”
Therefore, as Shiff suggests (ibid. 12), it is not possible to understand Impressionist art
41
adequately “without sufficient reference to its own subjectivity, the element to which
Castagnary and other early critics were sensitive, and its own definition of ‘truth.’”In the
development of modern art Impressionism was the first step towards modernism, abstraction
and subjectivism. Thus it is possible to think that despite its objective to be scientific,
Impressionism emphasized after all more the artist’s subjectivity, creativity and expression
than a resemblance with reality.
In literature in c. 1890-1910 the school of Impressionism was developed on the basis of
Realism, but it objected the detailed technique of description which was peculiar to Realism.
Instead, Impressionism gave importance to personal impressions, neglected the polishing of
the form which resulted in creating an atmosphere of momentariness and transience.
Impressionist form in literature was also brief, episodic and sketchy. Impressionist prose
often concentrated on the protagonist’s inner world. (Hosiaisluoma 2003, 347-348) As a
literary style, Impressionism is not a very clearly defined phenomenon. According to Hauser
(1977, 167), “its beginnings are hardly recognizable within the total complex of naturalism
and its later forms of development are completely merged with the phenomena of
symbolism.”
Impressionism is a personal style of writing, as Harry Shaw (1972, 198) explains, in
which the author develops characters and paints scenes as they appear to him at a given
moment rather than as they are (or may be) in actuality. “Impression” is also one of the
central ideas of the modernist novel, an idea originating in the Impressionist painting. As
Glen MacLeod (1999, 194) suggests, painters explored first the revolutionary possibilities of
modernism and painting became the leading art form. Modernist writers draw parallels for
their literary experiments from the visual arts (ibid.). Is it possible to find parallelism
between Impressionism and the stream of consciousness novel? Virginia Woolf, for example,
42
depicts momentary impressions in her modernist novels and the moment is one of her central
themes.
Although Woolf has not been characterized in literary histories as a writer of the
Impressionist school she, however, shares some of its central characteristics. Like the
Impressionists, Woolf depicts the moment and the inner world of the protagonists and creates
effects of momentariness and transience. In her novels we frequently meet the idea that only
the moment which is “here and now”has meaning in people’s lives. Woolf seems to say that
we must respect the “random moment,”make as much out of it as we can, because there is
nothing else in life except the moment. On the other hand, in the Impressionist painting the
level of meaning is claimed to be absent (see e.g. Preminger 1979, 381; Kallio & al 1991,
232), 8 while in Woolf’s novels philosophical meaning is nearly always present in her
depiction of moments and impressions mediated by an implicit narrator who represents the
characters and their thoughts. Yet, in some sections of her novels (e.g. the interludes in The
Waves) there are almost “pure visual impressions” or descriptions of nature without
philosophical comments or psychological analysis of the characters, which may be compared
to Impressionist paintings when they are understood as “surface phenomena” like
photographs. The interludes in The Waves may be compared to photographs or landscape
paintings in their objectivity, as has been implied also by Avrom Fleishman (1977, 153)
when he points out that these passages are “rendered in a voice resembling that of a
8
The absence of feelings and objectivity was the aim of the Impressionist painters (and poets), but already the
fact that they depicted the impressions of the painter is a proof that feelings and meanings are involved and the
end result, i.e. the painting, is not an objective, mechanic reproduction of reality. As Richard Shiff implies,
“impression”has different connotations, those associated with “a mechanistic account of the production of
images by means of light”(cf. photographs), and on the other hand, the impression may refer to particularity,
individuality and originality. For instance Monet tended to describe the Impressionist works as impressions
rather than effects because of the subjective connotation of the term wishing to call attention to the particularity
or originality of his sensation of nature. (Shiff 1984, 17-18)
43
conventional omniscient narrator, except that it is blankly objective in its treatment of natural
phenomena.”However, like in an Impressionist painting, even in these interludes there are
some signs of subjectivity, some interpretative elements. As Fleishman notes (ibid. 153), the
omniscient narrator’s voice shows marks of a subjective consciousness in the form of
metaphors, similes and “as if”constructions.
Some of the protagonists, for example, Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway and Mrs
Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, experience moments of beauty, illumination, stability and
happiness. Woolf often describes moments when the characters feel togetherness with other
people, or when they unexpectedly come across a moment of intense feeling with religious or
sexual connotations. For example, she depicts Clarissa having such a moment, “a sudden
revelation, a tinge like a blush,”and how she at that moment “had seen an illumination; a
match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed”(MD, 36). This Woolfian
moment of revelation is akin to James Joyce’s c epiphanies. The untheological use of the
term epiphany derives from James Joyce (cf. Savolainen 1987, 26; Orr 1991, 622). Joyce’s
epiphanies are “secular versions of the sudden revelations of religious experience,
illuminating the smallest or most immediate object of its vision,”whether it is “the dial on the
Ballast Clock in Stephen Hero, or the girl on the strand with the ‘likeness of seagull’in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”(Orr 1991, 622.)
According to Ralph Freedman (1980, 135-6), the moment of epiphany for Woolf is an
act of knowledge, an encounter between minds or between minds and things. It is a moment
of awareness “in which all relations are briefly, and evanescently, apparent.” Freedman
traces influences on Woolf’s “moment”from Wordsworth and Coleridge: Woolf herself has
noticed that “the unconscious ‘lower mind’perceives unity while the ‘upper mind’dissipates
itself in the facts of the day”(ibid.). But, as Freedman points out, this description is not only
44
Wordsworthian, but also suggests Bergson, Proust, Joyce’s epiphanies and theories of
Impressionist art. The epiphanic moment may, however, have also autobiographical origin,
for as Pamela J. Transue (1986, 138) notes, many of the recurring images in The Waves for
example, derive from Woolf’s childhood, from moments of shock, of sudden recognition or
perception about which Woolf wrote in her autobiographical piece “A Sketch of the Past”.
Her early years consisted largely of “non-being” or the “cotton wool” of daily existence
where nothing special to remember happens. This “non-being”was occasionally interrupted
by these moments of lasting perception. When Transue (ibid. 174) notes that the moments of
insight or epiphany are more characteristic of the state of sleep, or just before falling asleep,
her reading supports the Woolfian “view” that unity may be perceived better in the
unconscious mind. Transue points out how for example in Between the Acts the countryside
in its placidity provides a receptive state of mind for a moment of vision.
On the other hand, the epiphanic moment in Mrs Dalloway often refers to sexual or
love experiences, and in the case of Clarissa these epiphanies, as Emily Jensen (1983, 162-4)
notes, are feelings for a person of her own sex. Clarissa’s loved one is Sally Seton who she is
remembering in the novel from time to time. Woolf describes in Mrs Dalloway Clarissa’s
first moment of sexual fulfilment with Sally Seton, which may be characterized as an
epiphanic moment:
She and Sally Seton fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of
her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower,
kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down. The others
disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a
present, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she
45
uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling! (MD,
40)
Clarissa, having rejected religion, has found another means to express her sexual instincts.
She has a sensibility to beauty and an ability to create aesthetic moments, “moments of
being.”As Pamela J. Transue (1986, 105) says, Clarissa substitutes social event for sexual
event. In the novel a moment of epiphany takes place also when Clarissa identifies herself
with Septimus’s suicide. At the moment when Clarissa learns about Septimus’s suicide she
becomes violently alive, life becomes meaningful to her when she realizes that death is not
the only alternative one can choose. The ecstasy which Clarissa feels comes from the
simultaneous awareness of life and death. (Ibid. 198)
Also to Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse the impression, or the momentary vision, is
significant. When Mrs Ramsay goes deep into her fantasies she at the same time keeps
looking at the lighthouse until she feels that she becomes the light she is looking at. At a
moment like this Mrs Ramsay forgets herself and the world around her. The lighthouse beam
and the sound of the sea give her a sense of peace and unity: they are things that do not
change or disappear with time. But as for Mrs Dalloway in the other novel, the moment
passes quickly, and a feeling of doubt creeps into her mind: she begins to think that there is
no reason, order or justice in the world, and she knows that happiness does not last. With the
change of mood in her mind, her attitude towards the light changes. She begins to see the
light as pitiless and remorseless. Thus the reader realizes that she has the same paradoxical
attitude towards the lighthouse and the sound of the sea as towards life. Mrs Ramsay’s
identification with nature has mystical and romantic connotations. According to Pamela J.
46
Transue (1986, 88), Mrs Ramsay’s blending with nature is very similar to that often
described in Romantic poetry:
It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to things, inanimate things;
trees, streams, flowers; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational
tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself”(TL, 74).
Another epiphanic moment may be found at the end of To the Lighthouse where Lily
Briscoe, the artist of the novel, succeeds in completing her painting, capturing her vision,
finally being able to give it the last touch which is needed to express what she wants to say.
Woolf describes the artist’s short moment of intensive creative effort, which can be
compared to her own writer’s work in finishing her book:
Quickly, as if she were recalled at something. It would be destroyed. But what did
that matter? She asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they
were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With sudden intensity, as if she
saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was
finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my
vision. (TL, 237)
Avrom Fleishman (1977, 120) has paid attention to the role of the lighthouse, the fortresslike
tower acting as a source of illumination, as the “point of epiphany.”In my reading, the tower
acts in the novel as a symbol of hope and freedom and as a source of creativity, a fixed point
in the instability of life, which gives the characters possibility to escape from the
meaninglessness of daily existence and to experience moments of vision or perception. It
provides them the fulfilment of dreams, gives them peace and stability, and a feeling of unity
47
with “nature”or with other people. Both Lily and Mrs Ramsay experience their epiphanic
moments when they are guided by the lighthouse beam.
An Impressionist painter must have experienced the same kind of difficulties in trying
to capture the fleeting impression of a moment of reality or in trying to depict the right
atmosphere of a living situation. Woolf in her essay “The Moment: Summer’s Night”
describes and discusses different impressions experienced by the writer on a summer’s night.
She asks in the essay what composes the present moment, and like an Impressionist painter
might have done, gives the answer: “it is largely composed of visual and of sense
impressions” (Woolf 1966a, 293). Yet the Impressionist painter was not essentially
interested in finding unity or a meaning of life like Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. As
Kallio & al. (1991, 231) note, the Impressionists wanted to depict life in a new, objective way,
to create fragmentary impressions of what the eye was able to see at a certain moment. The
Impressionists considered the artist’s state of mind or emotions secondary, better still to be
excluded altogether. The reality should be approached in an impersonal way, like a camera
does (ibid.). However, as Shiff’s study Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the
Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art indicates, objectivity was only
one aspect of Impressionist art, since there exist various contradictory views and definitions
about the subjectivity and objectivity of the artistic movement. Besides, objectivity was more
a goal for the Impressionists than an existing fact.
Photography is another form of the visual arts which provides parallel readings with
the Impressionist painting and Woolf’s novels. Photography had a strong influence on
painting ever since Louis Daguerre first told about his invention in 1838. This new art form
had an immediate effect on portraiture and later in landscape painting, e.g. in Camille Corot’s
work, because with a camera you could capture the look-alike of objects. (Welton 1993, 28)
48
Many painters, for example Degas, used a camera as a means to facilitate their compositional
work. Especially the Impressionists imitated photography in its ability to catch a random
glimpse of life through the camera lens. But for instance Monet never took up photography,
although critics have detected in his paintings influences of the shadowy and shapeless
after-images produced by the long-exposure photography of the time (see Petrie 1979, 12,
48).
We cannot know exactly which things influence an artist, but certain effects of
photography may appear similar to the Impressionist painting. Monet’s painting Boulevard
des Capucines (1873), for example, has been compared with the photographs of the epoch on
account of obscurity: the long-time exposure made the photographs blurred. The brush
strokes representing people in the street in Monet’s painting are also blurred and thus give the
spectator an impression of movement. (Welton 1993, 29) This effect of motion comes close
to the representation of action in the cinema. Also Futurist painters attempted to represent
motion in their pictures by depicting the different stages of a moving person, dog or vehicle
thus adding the time element to them. In painting it is not easy to represent time or motion
because the art form is inherently spatial and immobile. In literature, on the other hand, time
is involved in the linear progression of the reading process, and time may be expressed on the
semantic level of language as well, i.e. in the narration of the story.
In Virginia Woolf’s novels the characters frequently attempt to stop the time and the
chaotic flow of impressions which their brains produce. Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse
sees Mrs Ramsay as somebody who has an ability to make the moment permanent. The same
way Lily herself tries in art to capture the shape of stability:
49
Mrs Ramsay saying ‘Life stand still here’; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment
something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment
permanent)
this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was
shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves
shaking) was struck into stability. (TL, 183)
Lily, Mrs Ramsay, and also Mrs Dalloway in the other novel, have a talent of finding shape
and stability in “the eternal passing and flowing.”These characters have a need to look for
enduring things in life, which is one way of stopping the time. Woolf seems to say that in the
imagination it is possible to escape the anxiety which the eternal flow of time causes.
In Between the Acts Woolf is again looking for unity, which the audience is supposed
to find together during a theatre performance. In this novel, too, there is an artist, Miss La
Trobe, who is the director of the country pageant that is performed by the village people.
Through the performance of the historical pageant Miss La Trobe wants to make her
audience, at least for a moment, feel togetherness and understand that they all have their
place in a larger historical pattern regardless of their financial or social position or personal
characteristics. Shared moments of vision, in Miss La Trobe’s philosophy, may bring a relief
in anguish:
Now Miss La Trobe stepped from her hiding. Flowing and streaming, on the grass,
on the gravel, still for one moment she held them together
the dispersing company.
Hadn’t she, for twenty-five minutes, made them see? A vision imparted was a relief
from agony. (BA, 74)
50
Moments of synthesis or vision, as Pamela J. Transue suggests (1986, 167), may be reached
through drama when in a dialectical process opposites, such as life and art, love and hate,
unity and dispersal, find temporary reconciliation.
It is possible to see a connection between Virginia Woolf’s characters and an
Impressionist painter or a photographer in their attempts to capture a moment of reality from
the ceaseless flux of time or “images.” When everything looks perfect the photographer
chooses the right moment to take a picture. The photographer must understand symmetric or
geometric relations and see what is important in the depicted object. When Lily Briscoe is
painting her picture of Mrs Ramsay she is also looking for the right geometric or symmetric
relations and chooses the right moment when everything looks perfect, but she can later
change her picture whereas the photographer has only that one moment. Henri
Cartier-Bresson 9 has written about the “decisive moment” in photography, about the
instantaneity that is involved in photography. He explains that a photographer is dependent
on timing and has to choose the right moment: “Of all the means of expression, photography
is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in
things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance
on earth that can make them come back again”(Cartier-Bresson 1998, 27).
To Cartier-Bresson photography means dealing with reality. The task of a
photographer is first of all to perceive reality, not to manipulate it while shooting nor the
results in the darkroom, because “these tricks are discernible to those who have eyes to see.”
He sees the task of a writer easier in this respect: the writer has time to reflect, to accept and
9
Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had studied painting with André Lhôte in Paris and painting and literature in
Cambridge University in 1928, developed a serious interest in photography in 1931. His book Images à la
sauvette (The Decisive Moment) was first published in 1952 in Paris. (Weaver 1989, 454)
51
reject. (Cartier-Bresson 1998, 27) The writer of fiction, on the other hand, manipulates reality,
he/she does not simply record the events, but everything that he/she writes is filtered through
his/her own personality, all the observations are subjective visions. Although subjectivity,
personality and imagination play a greater role in the work of a writer than that of a
photographer, they both may find the truth, capture a unique moment of reality, which
conveys the essence of the depicted object, person or event.
Like Cartier-Bresson, Clarissa Dalloway, in her constant fight against time and ageing,
tries to stop the flux of time, to transfix it. The diminishing life-span and growing old worries
Clarissa, but she realizes that each moment of life is valuable and the enjoyment of each
moment is the secret of happiness. She understands that the whole world must be created
anew every moment in her mind. She also feels the fragmentariness of existence in her own
split personality. Her inner self and the outward appearance are in constant conflict with each
other:
Laying her brooch on the table, she had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused,
the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken
into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July,
August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch a falling drop, Clarissa
(crossing to the dressing table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it,
there
the moment of the June morning on which was the pressure of all other
mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the
whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of
the women who was the very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.
(MD, 41-42)
52
The image in the mirror symbolizes Clarissa’s aspiration to define her identity and her
surroundings. The passage above, in which Clarissa makes a conscious effort to create her
life and the moment of the particular morning of June, suggests Henri Bergson’s idea on
duration (durée) as a free creation. Life, as Georges Poulet (1959, 35) points out, is
continuous creation in the sense of Bergson and the twentieth-century thinking, which is
what Clarissa’s conscious act may be thought to represent. It is not creation by God, but
creation by the mind. Every instant when we act, we create that action and at the same time
we create ourselves and the world. (Ibid.) As Maggie Humm (2002, 80) remarks, in Matter
and Memory Bergson states that we inaccurately think of perception as a kind of
photographic view, when in reality “the photograph is already taken,”and every perception is
already memory.
Fascinating about portraits, as Cartier-Bresson notes, is the way in which they enable
us to trace the sameness of man. He writes about the importance of the first impression in
making a good portrait:
What is there more fugitive and transitory than the expression on a human face? The
first impression given by a particular face is often the right one; but the photographer
should try always to substantiate the first impression by “living” with the person
concerned. The decisive moment and psychology, no less than camera position, are the
principal factors in the making of a good portrait. (Cartier-Bresson 1998, 31)
In this passage the thought of the transitoriness of an expression is very Baudelairean (cf.
Baudelaire 2001, 191), for he as well stressed the fluidity of modern life and praised painting
for its ability to express the constant change central to the experience of modernity.
Baudelaire, however, did not yet understand photography as a form of art capable of
53
expressing these fugitive and transitory features of modern experience, even though
photography was a product of the era which fascinated him (Price and Wells 2004, 13).
Woolf’s novels frequently set forth her interest in the artist’s creative problems similar
to those Cartier-Bresson writes about in his book: in To the Lighthouse there is the painter
Lily Briscoe, in Orlando the fantastic androgynous poet Orlando, in The Waves there is the
writer Bernard and in Between the Acts the director Miss La Trobe. These characters struggle
with problems of timing, they are looking for the right moment when they could capture the
essence of life, like Cartier-Bresson was waiting for “the decisive moment,” which is, as
Derrick Price puts it, “a formal flash of time when all right elements were in place before the
scene fell back into its quotidian disorder”(Price and Wells 2004, 73). The momentary vision
is important to Miss La Trobe, who had made the spectators “see”for twenty-five minutes.
She finds a relief from agony through this moment of vision which she shares with the
spectators of the pageant. Bernard in The Waves ponders about the relationship between
words and visual impressions:
‘These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom. Tahiti
becomes possible. Leaning over this parapet I see far out a waste of water. A fin turns.
This bare visual impression is unattached to any line of reason, it springs up as one
might see the fin of a porpoise on the horizon. Visual impressions often communicate
thus briefly statements that we shall in time to come uncover and coax into words.
[… ]’(W, 127-128)
We find Bernard in the Italian room at the National Gallery looking at Titian’s paintings and
comparing painters to poets, who, according to him, are “not chained to the rock,”and thus
achieve the silence and sublimity. He goes on to explain the difficulty of grasping ideas, how
54
they escape easily and how later in some moment of revelation the poet may grasp them.
(Ibid. 105-106) It is true what Barthes (1980, 52) says about a painting communicating
silence. Silence is an effect much harder to achieve for a writer who suddenly by means of
one single word is able to change a sentence from description to reflection. Reflection and the
world of ideas are constantly present in written works of art, either by means of characters’
dialogue and thoughts, or through a narrator.
Contingency is a characteristic often associated with photography (Barthes 1980, 52)
and photography has a reputation of being the most realistic of the mimetic arts (Sontag 1978,
51), although contingency and realism are just some of the many means which photography
can use. Photographs can be manipulated and made fictive or fantastic and portraits and still
lifes may be carefully planned in advance. In manipulated and planned photographs chance
plays no bigger role than in paintings or novels. Important in all the mimetic arts is that the
artist is trying to create a representation or an impression of reality.
Roland Barthes suggests that the photograph is outside meaning, because it is
contingent upon its referent (cf. Price and Wells 2004, 32). The photograph’s relationship to
reality is different from that of the painting or the novel, because the photograph, especially
the press photograph, is a mechanical analogue of reality. Barthes has paid attention to this
special status of the photographic image by claiming that the photograph is a message
without a code. However, this straightforward relationship to reality discussed by Barthes
applies better to the press photograph and not so well to the artistic photograph. In artistic
photographs, just as in other art forms, e.g. literature, painting, and film, a code is included,
which is the treatment, the “art”or the rhetoric of the photograph (Barthes 1979, 17-18).
Even though it is true that all the arts (including photography) have a code and thus are not
outside meaning, Impressionism and the stream-of-consciousness novel tried to imitate the
55
contingency of reality, which the photograph may be thought to grasp better than other means
of expression. A stream-of-consciousness writer imitates the verbal processes in the human
mind, and an Impressionist painter imitates the visual perceptions received by the brains.
Also a photographer imitates the visual impressions of a human being looking at reality.
Although the photograph is a piece of reality, it is also an interpretation of reality and the
reality is not the same to every one. Woolf in her novels, on the other hand, despite her
interest in the “random moment”was in continuous search for meaning in both art and life.
A picture, whether a painting or a photograph, is characteristically immobile, while a
modern novel is a continuous stream of impressions imitating the chaotic instability of the
human consciousness. Yet a painting and a photograph can exceed its immobility if an
artist/photographer represents continuity, change, or narration by means of a series of
paintings or photographs. Claude Monet in his Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral series has
captured the alterations taking place in a landscape or a city view in a series of paintings
depicting the same view or object in different seasons and weathers. The series paintings by
Monet may be compared with Virginia Woolf’s descriptions of the different movements of
the sun, the alterations in the sky, changes in colours, waves and landscape in The Waves.
Like Monet’s paintings, these descriptive passages of nature in The Waves imply the passage
of time by changes in the landscape.
In Monet’s painting we may read signs of subjectivity implicit in the word ‘impression’.
Also in this respect Monet may be likened to Virginia Woolf. Monet’s art, according to
Richard Shiff (1984, 8) was regarded in the 1890s in both Impressionist and Symbolist terms.
In Virginia Woolf’s novels symbolism is central as well, as I will demonstrate later in this
study (see ch. 6). In the writings of many early critics of the Impressionist art the
terminologies and practices of Impressionism and Symbolism are almost identical. For
56
example in Gustave Geoffrey’s introductory essay to the exhibition of Monet’s Meules series
(1891), a personal friend of the artist spoke of Monet’s colours and forms as analogous to
emotionally expressive gestures and implied that the paintings expressed symbolic content.
But, Monet, in Geoffrey’s opinion, resembled also an Impressionist painter in his sensation
of the ephemeral instant. Symbolism and Impressionism were in many respects closer to each
other than has usually been suggested. For example, as Shiff points out (ibid. 12), both
Impressionist and Symbolist art exemplified the ways of discovering the real or the true. Also
the mode of perception was more significant to the Impressionist and Symbolist artist than
the vision seen or the image presented. They both sought the elusive immediate, and both the
Impressionist’s “impression” and the Symbolist’s “symbol” represented a vision. (Ibid.
10-12)
The immobility of a photographic image can be exceeded by means of a reportage or a
picture story. This juxtaposition of photographs is comparable to the series of paintings by
Monet. Henri Cartier-Bresson describes the difficulties in trying to capture the essence of an
event through a series of pictures:
The picture-story involves a joint operation of the brain, the eye, and the heart. The
objective of this joint operation is to depict the content of some event which is in the
process of unfolding, and to communicate impressions. Sometimes a single event can
be so rich in itself and its facets that it is necessary to move all around it in your search
for the solution to the problem it poses
for the world is movement, and you cannot
be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving. Sometimes you light
upon the picture in seconds; it might also require hours or days. But there is no
standard plan, no pattern from which to work. You must be on the alert with the brain,
the eye, the heart, and have a suppleness of body. (Cartier-Bresson 1998, 24)
57
Films get even closer to the essence of life. Cinema with its fast flowing images resembles
Virginia Woolf’s changing impressions even more than Monet’s series paintings or a
photographic picture story. Film is composed of photographs that flow before the spectator’s
eyes so fast that he/she is not able to separate them, look at them or remember them.
Jean-Paul Sartre has pointed out that the reading of novels creates no mental pictures in our
minds, and in this respect reading in its imagelessness is the opposite of photograph’s
“image-totality”(see Barthes 1980, 139).
Impressionist paintings do not have any meaningful details that touch the viewer
particularly, because they are beautiful pictures which are not even meant to cause any great
disturbance in the spectator. Likewise, some of Virginia Woolf’s impressionistic novels,
especially Jacob’s Room, leave the reader devoid of feelings; nothing in them touches the
reader particularly. In Jacob’s Room nothing happens, instead, the reader receives multiple
impressions in a continuum around the main character Jacob Flanders.
Parallels may be drawn between Impressionist paintings and descriptions in Woolf’s
novels. For instance, efforts to capture the right atmosphere by means of colours and light,
which were the central aims of Claude Monet, may be compared to Virginia Woolf’s
descriptions of changing colours and lights in a scene depicting gradual changes in the sea
and the sky in the first interlude of The Waves:
The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the
sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened
a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became
barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following
each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.
58
As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of
white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a
sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the
horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the
glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or
as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised her lamp higher and
the air seemed become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and
flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire.
Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one
incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it
into a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and
lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the
arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became
visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed
gold. (W, 5)
The above description of a view of the morning sky and the sea might be read as
instructions to an Impressionist landscape painter or as a verbal equivalent or visualization of
an imagined Impressionist painting. Woolf depicts the colour effects in the morning sky with
the colour words of yellow, red, blue, green, white and grey, and hands them over to the
reader to blend in his or her imagination like, as Joseph Frank (1963, 25) puts it, “the
Impressionist painters juxtaposed pure tones on the canvas, instead of mixing them on the
palette, in order to leave the blending of colors to the eye of the spectator.” Metaphoric
expressions and personifications such as “the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had
wrinkles in it,” “the wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose
breath comes and goes unconsciously,”“the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the
sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green,”“the sky cleared as if the
59
white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had
raised her lamp higher” may be understood as an artistic expression, a subjective poetic
vision that for example in a Monet painting is expressed through creative brushwork and the
choice and arrangement of colours. Light and colour make Monet’s paintings alive and
“real,” they bring for instance the sunshine into the picture (cf. Haystacks, late summer,
1890-91) without the sun actually appearing in the picture. The reader of this passage in The
Waves interprets the verbal description of alterations in colours and forms as an image of
gradual stages of change. Similarly, the viewer of Monet’s landscape paintings interprets the
colours and lights as living vibrating organisms, as perpetually changing shades and nuances
in nature. In the art of both artists we encounter the forever flying time and reality, the
Bergsonian durée. Yet the reader may also see this depiction of dawn as a metaphor of the
childhood of the characters.
Jacob’s Room, as well, may be compared to an Impressionist painting in its “use of
colours”: Woolf uses frequently colour words the same way as an Impressionist painter uses
his brush, adding a little colour here and there. She often “paints”with the Impressionist pure
palette as well, using the colour words blue, green, yellow, red, and also white, the colour
which the Impressionists used as the background colour in their canvases (cf. the quoted
passage from The Waves above). Butterflies of different colours are depicted in the following
description in Jacob’s Room:
Back came the sun, dazzlingly.
It fell like an eye upon the stirrups, and then suddenly and yet very gently rested
upon the bed, upon the alarum clock, and upon the butterfly box stood open. The pale
clouded yellows had pelted over the moor; they had zigzagged across the purple clover.
The fritillaries flaunted along the hedgerows. The blues settled on little bones lying on
60
the turf with the sun beating on them, and the painted ladies and the peacocks feasted
upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk. Miles away from home, in a hollow among
teasels beneath a ruin, he had found the commas. He had seen a white admiral circling
higher and higher round an oak tree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman
living alone, high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every summer to
her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she told him. And if
you looked out at dawn you could always see two badgers. Sometimes they knocked
each other over like two boys fighting, she said. (JR, 21-22)
In this image of butterflies there is to be sensed the evasiveness of life, the randomness of
impressions which are caught by the human mind. Also an Impressionist painting captures
these evasive moments, the random impressions of scenes, landscapes or city views. An
image in Jacob’s Room is constantly changing and evolving, it is not bound to one place like
a painting. For example, in a painting of butterflies we are able to see only one space, only
one random moment, whereas in a short passage of a novel the reader may move from place
to place and capture many impressions. In a novel, of course, there are no colours; there are
only colour words that describe the “observations”of the narrator, which the reader has to
translate in his mind into an image. Thus descriptions of visual observations by the narrator
can be understood as visualizations in a novel. Since Jacob’s Room is predominantly a
descriptive novel concentrating on depicting different views of nature and interiors of
different rooms, it may be considered largely a visual novel.
The sketchlike finish of Impressionism is a feature of Woolf’s novelistic technique
which she assumed when she started her career “from scratch”in her short stories, and as
Jean Guiguet indicates (1965, 238), she also sought to retain the quality of a sketch in her
novels. In her fiction she has the following characteristics mentioned by Guiguet which
belong more to the novella than the novel:
61
The lightness of touch, the way the colours shade off indefinitely, the precision of
anecdotes scribbled in the margin, so to speak, the slightness of the illusory present, the
schematic, distilled flashbacks to the past, the fragmentary characters glimpsed
through the consciousness of other characters (ibid.).
This sketchiness described by Guiguet characterizes well Woolf’s first experimental novel
Jacob’s Room. The form of the novel lacks elaboration; it has an air of instantaneity and
spontaneity. As Transue (1986, 51) notes, Jacob emerges as a composite of other people’s
fleeting impressions of him and it is impossible to form a coherent story from these pieces of
conversation and the point of view is constantly shifting. Winifred Holtby (1978, 117) calls
Woolf’s writing method in Jacob’s Room a “cinematographic technique,” thus probably
referring to the montage technique which Woolf uses.
The brushwork of Monet’s paintings Boulevard des Capucines (1873-4) composed of
patches of colour suggests rather than defines form (see Petrie 1979, 10). The same kind of
imprecision and suggestiveness is to be found in Jacob’s Room. The novel concentrates on
the descriptions of spaces around Jacob, the places he visited and the rooms he inhabited. But
Jacob is never present, nothing precise is told about his character or his thoughts. He remains
an obscure figure and a mystery to the reader. Also the structure of the novel is very loose,
even though there is a chronological order of events, which, however, can scarcely be called
a plot in the traditional sense of the word. Instead of a plot or psychological analyses of
character, impressions follow one another in a fairly random order. Arnold Hauser (1977,
175) sees in the Impressionists’attempt to arrest the fleeting hour and in their aim to live in
the moment a revolt against the routine and discipline of bourgeois practice. Virginia Woolf
62
has the same rebellious attitude towards “bourgeois”traditional literature, which she attacks
in some of her essays, e.g. in “Mr and Mrs Bennett”and “Modern Fiction.”
4. The Fusion of Temporal Dimensions
Henri Bergson’s influence on the twentieth century art is significant, particularly on such
concepts as time, space and memory. His philosophy has directly or indirectly influenced all
the art forms: literature, music, painting and film. The impact of his thinking can be noticed
in the modernist novel, for example in the stream-of-consciousness novel of Marcel Proust,
Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and in the visual arts for instance in
Cubist techniques such as collage, and in the compilation film. 10 The development of the new
art forms photography and cinema influenced the older art forms such as painting and
literature as they provided new possibilities and techniques for the representation of modern
life and culture. Especially cinema was influential with its special characteristic of
representing time and movement. Likewise, Maggie Humm (2002, 80) cites Woolf having
claimed in 1932 “I may say that I have never read Bergson,”though Humm does not indicate
her source of information.
It is difficult to track which direction the influences go, and, as Michael Hollington
(1978, 431) notes, we do not have to prove that Thomas Mann read Bergson or Marcel Proust
admired him to detect his importance to their art. Neither do we have to prove Bergson’s
influence on Woolf, 11 even though the general belief is that Woolf never read Bergson. For
10
11
Cf. for the compilation film von Bagh, 2002.
See e.g. Dahl 1970, 15; Ward 1968, 116-117; Church 1963, 70 on Bergson’s influence on Woolf.
63
instance, in his dissertation12 on Woolf’s conception of time in her works Erik Wiget (1949,
17-18) denies Woolf ever having read Bergson despite his conviction of Bergson’s indirect
influence on Woolf. Wiget has found in Woolf’s novels among other things the
representation of Bergson’s concept durée (duration) related to the chaotic flow of
consciousness, in which the unity of the past, the present and the future can be felt (ibid. 17).
Henri Bergson is among the philosophers who believe that “the act of the mind”is
essential for the existence of time and space. This is to be seen in his special notion of mind
time, which he calls durée. First of all, he makes a distinction between two kinds of time: the
time of physics 13 and the time of consciousness, i.e. durée, or pure duration. Bergson
explains in his influential work L’Évolution créatrice (1963, 494) what he means by the
concept durée which he frequently uses in his philosophical works: “[… ] ‘durée réelle’
signifie à la fois continuité indivisée et création” (‘real duration’means both undivided
continuity and creation). According to my interpretation, he means that it is impossible to
separate past moments from present moments, that time is a continuum, which the human
mind organizes into different unitts. Bergson argues that space is necessary for our ability to
observe time, and that duration and movement are mental syntheses, not real things. He also
observes that duration takes an illusory form from a homogenous environment, and that the
hyphen between space and duration is simultaneity, which can be defined as an intersection
of time and space (ibid. 74). In Time and Free Will (1960, 100-107) Bergson explains that
durée is qualitative by its nature, and therefore it cannot be measured unless it is symbolically
represented in space, whereas the time of physics is quantitative and measurable.
12
Erik Wiget’s dissertation Virginia Woolf und die Konzeption der Zeit in ihren Werken (Zürich,1949) is a
philosophically and thematically oriented study which does not discuss literary and aesthetic devices.
13
The time of physics is approximately the same as clocktime, see Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form. A
Theory of Art (1953, 111).
64
Bergson’s ideas on time, space and simultaneity have found their echo in modernist
art, but questions of time and space have preoccupied artists and theorists long before
modernism. G. E. Lessing in his study Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und
Poesie (1766) was the first to pay attention to the problems of time in art (cf. Valkonen 1985,
17). Lessing made a distinction between two categories of art: the time-arts and the space-arts.
The time-arts music and literature are based on consecutiveness in time, and the space-arts
painting, sculpture and architecture are based on co-existence in space. Music can express its
material both consecutively through melody and simultaneously through harmony, but the
novel can only suggest simultaneity by using illusion-creating devices, because language,
unlike music, is by its nature merely consecutive. (Mendilow 1965, 23, 216) This distinction
between time-arts and space-arts is based on the perception of a work of art by the observer.
Yet, for example in modernist sculpture, usually categorized as space-art, there are mobile
works of art where the time element is central, e.g. Alexander Calder’s mobiles, whose shape
shifts and alters during the perception thus getting its full meaning through consecutive forms
evolving in sequences.
Language, the substance of literature, is constructed in time. Although language is
forward-moving, sequential and irreversible, its other level, that of meaning, enables it to
express other temporal relations besides linearity. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (1983, 44)
distinguishes between two different time systems in narrative fiction: that of story-time,
which usually means a linear succession of events, and that of text-time, which refers to the
time spent in the process of reading the text. Text-time is one-directional and irreversible and
therefore necessarily linear, while story-time may involve returns to a past point in the story
or anticipations of future events. In Gérard Genette’s narrative theory (see Genette 1972,
77-120) these returns to the past and anticipations of the future are aspects of time order, in
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other words, they are discrepancies between story-order and text-order (Rimmon-Kenan
1983, 46).
In the literature of modernism the impression of chronology has been deliberately
broken off by leaps into the past or to the future. The stream-of-consciousness novel is
probably the most conspicuous example of this, but it is also a feature to be found in other
works of modernism. The change in collective sensibility, as James McFarlane (1981, 82-84)
suggests, which took place at the beginning of the twentieth century, had its effects first of all
in art, science and philosophy. Influential in philosophy was Bergson’s thinking which
argued for the recognition of subjective logic, and Einstein’s Relativity Theory which argued
for the relatedness of space and time, as opposed to space and time as distinct and discrete
elements. This change in collective mentality was reflected in the works of modernist
literature and in various modernist literary movements. (See ibid.)
The stream-of-consciousness novel was born between 1913 and 1915 when three
writers, Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce began to write approximately
at the same time fiction that depicted internal reality (Edel 1955, 11-12). These writers were
influenced by other writers, e.g. by the French writer Eduard Dujardin and his work Les
Lauriers sont coupées with its discovery of a new technique, monologue intérieur, and
psychological time, and on the other hand by French Symbolist poetry. (Friedman 1981,
453-455) Virginia Woolf became influenced by Proust, Joyce and Richardson, and according
to Hermione Lee (1977, 22) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917) and the first
chapters of Ulysses (1922) made a strong impression on Woolf and so she started in 1922
with Jacob’s Room her experimentations of the stream-of-consciousness techniques.
One of the essential features of the stream-of-consciousness novel is a new conception
of time. In this genre, consciousness moves freely in time and these movements are fluid and
66
unbound by arbitrary time concepts (Humphrey 1954, 9). The following passage by Robert
Humphrey describes well the workings of psychological time in the genre:
The premise is that the psychic processes, before they are rationally controlled for
communication purposes, do not follow calendar continuity. Everything that enters
consciousness is there at the ”present moment”; furthermore, the event of
this ”moment,”no matter how much clock time it occupies, may be infinitely extended
by being broken up into its parts, or it may be highly compressed into a flash of
recognition. (Ibid. 42-43)
The underlying philosophy of the stream-of-consciousness novel is influenced by Henri
Bergson’s psychological time theories (Edel 1955, 28; Humphrey 1954, 120). The
conviction behind this novel genre is that consciousness is like a flux, and that mind has its
own time and space values, different from those of the external world. Thus flux and durée
are aspects of the psychic life for which new methods of narration had to be created, if writers
were to describe them. (Humphrey 1954, 120)
Also in Virginia Woolf’s literary techniques there are clear analogies with Bergson’s
thinking, although her narrative is not always naturalistic imitation of the psychic processes.
To deal systematically with the depiction of psychological time, the Bergsonian durée and
the free ordering of the dimensions of time, i.e. the past, the present and the future, I shall
apply a classification system outlined by Gérard Genette in Discours du récit. Essai de
méthode (1972). Genette distinguishes in a narrative between analepses and prolepses,14
14
‘Analepsis’ is equivalent for the term ‘flashback’ or ‘retrospection’ and ‘prolepsis’ is similar to
‘foreshadowing’or ‘anticipation’(see Rimmon-Kenan 1983, 46). The term ‘flashforward’has also been used,
especially in cinematic contexts (cf. also ‘flashback’). A ‘flashback’is an insertion within a narrative of an
account of earlier events (Beja 1979, 312).
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which are terms to describe the deviations in the chronological line of events: an analepsis is
a reference or a return to past events (in relation to the moment to which the story has
progressed), and a prolepsis is a reference to future events. Both analepses and prolepses can
be external or internal, i.e. refer to a time earlier or later with respect to the time of narration.
(Genette 1972, 90-114)
The concepts of analepsis and prolepsis are applicable for the following analysis of
time in Virginia Woolf’s novels, even though I shall not go into the details of Genette’s
complicated classifications. At the beginning of Mrs Dalloway there is an internal prolepsis:
Clarissa Dalloway refers to the event which will take place at the end of the novel, i.e. the
party which she will arrange in the evening of the same day. The planning of the party is
actually the connecting thought of the whole novel. The shifting of thoughts happens fluently
in Woolf’s fiction, because she is using the psychological association technique. With this
technique it is easy for the writer to jump from the past or the present to the future and back
again, because it imitates the thought processes of the human mind. This prolepsis at the
beginning of the novel is important both for the structure and the plot of the novel.
Since Mrs Dalloway is a novel composed of the thoughts and feelings of its characters,
it is unavoidable that it deals with their memories as well. A person met suddenly in the street
can be an impulse for a character to move back in time. For example, Clarissa starts recalling
the earlier phases of her life after she has met accidentally in the street her friend Hugh
Whitbread when she is strolling in London. Hugh reminds Clarissa of Peter Walsh, another
friend of hers, who was in love with Clarissa when they were young. In the middle of these
memories, however, the reader is being reminded of the present moment:
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So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still making out that she had
been right
and she had too
not to marry him. (MD, 10)
She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses in
Piccadilly. (MD, 10)
The analepses concerning Peter Walsh are external, since the events remembered have
happened before the beginning of the novel. As we can see in the extracts above, Woolf uses
the third person narrative, an omniscient narrator15, who “reads”the minds of the characters,
instead of a “camera”point of view, or the dramatic mode16 used for example by Hemingway
in short stories such as “Hills Like White Elephants”, Henry James in The Awkward Age
(1899), The Europeans (1878) and The Sacred Fount (1901), as well as John Dos Passos in
The Big Money (1936) (see Friedman 1975, 155). Woolf’s choice of multiple selective
omniscience is well justified because the author-narrator has a definite function in the story,
i.e. to bring “irony, compassion, philosophical range and depth”(cf. ibid. 157) or psychology
of the characters into the narrative. The prolepses in Mrs Dalloway are especially important
for the narrative structure of the novel. Mostly they are short comments concerning the party
about to take place in the evening, whereas the analepses are long passages acting as
essential descriptions of the lives of the characters.
The reminders of the past in Woolf’s novels are similar to the catalysts
a device
which Marcel Proust used in his fiction to turn the attention to past events. There is another
name for this device referring to its initiator: the madeleine17. The madeleine is usually a
15
Stream-of-consciousness is a subdivision of selective omniscience. Woolf uses a mixture of first and third
person, present and past tense.
16
In the dramatic mode the author and the narrator have been eliminated, as well as the depiction of mental
states. The information given to the reader is limited to what the characters do and say, their appearance and
setting resemble stage directions (Friedman 1975, 155).
17
Madeleine or catalyst differs from leitmotif, since it is not a thing repeated in the narrative.
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thing or an object (Church 1963, 84, 89). In Virginia Woolf’s fiction also a place, a person or
somebody’s words may function as a madeleine. For example, in Mrs Dalloway (1975, 66)
the words “the death of the soul”start a process of remembrance in Peter Walsh’s mind. The
words make him move back in time to events and people associated to those words. This is an
example of an external analepsis, since the events remembered are outside the story-time of
the novel.
In To the Lighthouse, analepses and prolepses do not have a great significance and
their frequency is quite small compared to Mrs Dalloway where they are an essential element
of the narration. However, the two major sections of To the Lighthouse called “The Window”
and “The Lighthouse” could be thought to represent a prolepsis and an analepsis
symbolically. In “The Window”-chapter the characters are positively looking forward to the
future and James Ramsay supported by his mother is planning an expedition to the lighthouse,
which could be a metaphor of light, love, future and the continuity of life. On the other hand,
in “The Lighthouse” -section all the characters are looking back to the times when Mrs
Ramsay was still alive. Especially Lily Briscoe seems to be stuck with the past, the happy
times which she is trying to capture again in her painting. With the memory of Mrs Ramsay
and her magic skill to understand life and unify people, Lily is able to find the missing
element in her painting, an element that makes it complete.
There are some occasional smaller analepses in To the Lighthouse, for example, when
William Bankes returns to the past while looking at the faraway sand hills, which function as
a madeleine for an external analepsis concerning Mr Ramsay and himself:
Looking at the far sand hills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay: thought of a road in
Westmorland, thought of Ramsay striding along a road by himself hung round with
70
that solitude which seemed to be his natural air. But this was suddenly interrupted,
William Bankes remembered (and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen,
straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay,
stopping, pointed his stick and said ‘Pretty
pretty’, an odd illumination into his
heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble
things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of
road. After that, Ramsay had married. (TL, 25)
This analepsis leads William Bankes to speculations about his relationship with Mr Ramsay
that changed after the incident in Westmorland. This is probably the reason for the survival of
the memory in William Bankes’s memory. The most effective analepsis is at the end of the
novel when Lily, while finishing her painting in the same place where she started it ten years
earlier, relives the past moment with the Ramsays and their guests. The painting functions as
a catalyst for the memory. This scene is a good example of Virginia Woolf’s skilful and
smooth changes between the time dimensions, the movement of thoughts from the present
reality to the past image and back again: the image rises naturally from the situation. The
magic aura of this image from the past stresses the theme of the whole novel: that people and
events remain in other people’s minds, and even longer in their works, particularly in art. We
may think that art is the revival of the past, and Lily’s painting is the revival of the past
moment on the beach: “And as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped into the past there.
Now Mrs Ramsay got up, she remembered.”(TL 195).
In Woolf’s last novel Between the Acts there are not many prolepses, but there are quite
a few analepses which are important thematically. The themes of the novel are artistic
creation, time and the impossibility of unity between people. The analepses in the novel are
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either imaginative reconstructions of the past (p. 10-11) while reading The Outline of History,
as Mrs Swithin does, or childhood experiences relived:
Tempted by the sight to continue her imaginative reconstruction of the past, Mrs
Swithin paused; she was given to increasing the bounds of the moment by flights into
past or future; or sidelong down corridors and alleys; but she remembered her
mother
her mother in that very room rebuking her. 'Don’t stand gaping, Lucy, or the
wind’ll change...’(BA, 11)
The choice of historical periods in the pageant, as David Leon Higdon points out (1977, 126),
were probably inspired by H. G. Wells who had written The Outline of History which Mrs
Swithin reads. In Between the Acts there are also some madeleines, e.g. when Mrs Swithin is
called by her nickname. When she hears the name Cindy she plunges into her childhood
memories (p. 19-20). Another madeleine for Mrs Swithin is the word ‘fish’, which again
reanimates her childhood.
Especially in the above-analyzed three novels, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and
Between the Acts Virginia Woolf uses analepses and prolepses, because they give expression
to the Bergsonian durée, in other words, time in the human mind where the temporal
dimensions of present, past and future are fused in the continual flow of impressions and
memories. The Waves, on the other hand, is not made up of movement between different
temporal dimensions, but its time is a chronological passage from childhood to maturity of
the six protagonists, their minds being followed simultaneously. As Eric Warner points out,
despite the sustained present tense, the characters in the novel are “linked to a clear temporal
progression, a steady sense of time passing”(1987, 92). The devices used in the novel to
mark the progression of time are the interludes which may be seen as metaphors of the
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different ages in the characters lives. But Woolf uses in the novel also the “repetitive”mode,
as Warner notes (ibid. 95), which in Gérard Genette’s terminology is placed under the
category of frequency. In The Waves this means that an event is told more than once, for
instance, at the farewell dinner for Percival in the fourth section the six characters return to
their past and re-tell the occurrences of their earlier narrative (ibid.).
Time is a fundamental element especially in the cinema, because it presents a
continuum of images and sounds composing a story the same way as a novel does with words
and in both art forms the retrospection of past events and anticipation of the future are normal
practices. Jacques Aumont (1994, 183) points out that time in cinema is the present tense, the
“now-time,”which is what the psychological novel (or the stream-of-consciousness novel)
strives to depict as well. When we are looking for parallels between literary and cinematic
techniques in the representation of temporal dimensions, the most obvious analogy for
Genette’s analepsis is flashback, a term used often in literary analysis as well. Because
images have no grammatical tenses, as Moris Beja explains (1979, 272), in movies
flashbacks are often introduced by slow dissolves or by ripples across the screen or other
visual announcements. In some modern films, however, the past may be introduced with
quick cuts, for instance in films such as Alain Resnais’Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and
Last Year in Marienbad (1961), Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (ibid.).
When a cinematic device such as flashback is adapted for literature, as Morris Beja explains,
the effect is often quite different. In a novel a flashback may be handled so that we are aware
of its being an element out of the past. This is more difficult to accomplish in a film, because
images have no tenses and therefore they are always in the present tense (ibid. 79).
Discussing Jacob’s Room (1922) Adrian Velicu notices that Woolf, when trying to
cover more time, places and events in fewer words, uses a technique of leaping from one
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moment and place to another, without explanatory links (1985, 31-31). Velicu sees in this
device a connection to a cinematic technique of montage.18 According to Yrjö Hosiaisluoma
(2003, 597), montage is in particular a feature of impressionistic literary works such as
Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Like Velicu points out, Jacob’s Room is a novel in which practically
nothing is revealed about Jacob’s mind, unlike in Woolf’s subsequent novels where the main
characters’experiences are followed through their own thoughts (ibid. 31). In this kind of
novelistic technique it is more natural to use sudden cuts or montage because the protagonist
is observed from outside by other characters or the narrator. Jacob’s Room’s is not
constructed by means of the analepsis/flashback device for the simple reason that we are not
reading the thoughts of the protagonist and therefore memories belonging to mind time are
irrelevant. Usually in Jacob’s Room a sudden cut in the narration is marked typographically
by a blank line:
She was on her way to sit to Nick Branham the painter.
She sat in a flowered Spanish shawl, holding in her hand a yellow novel. (JR, 111)
However, some quick analepses and anticipative passages can be detected in Jacob’s Room
as well (cf. Blackstone, p. 58; Velicu 35), but it is especially the one-day novels Mrs
Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts depicting the present moment that more
18
Many critics who have examined connections between James Joyce’s art and film have noticed his use of a
technique extraordinarily close to what film critics and theorists mean by montage. However, many novelists
used a similar technique even before the invention of film, for example Flaubert in the scene at the fair in
Madame Bovary and Charles Dickens, as well as Lawrence Sterne already in the eighteenth century (Beja 1979,
75) Sergei Eisenstein became famous for his innovative montage technique. In Eisenstein’s montage technique
some fundamental aspects remained constant throughout his career. Firstly, montage always involved the
juxtaposition of disparate elements. Secondly, these juxtaposed elements were the techniques of the film
medium and they were all equal in their potential as montage devices: sound, colour, depth, editing rhythm, etc.
(Thompson 1981, 5).
74
frequently use analepses and prolepses. In these novels the transition between the temporal
dimensions, e.g. from the present to the past, takes usually place by means of introductory
words by the narrator, which correspond to visual announcements in films. For example in
Mrs Dalloway Woolf uses phrases like “she could remember” (p. 9), or she makes a
transition by means of a madeleine, which in the following extract is the words “the death of
the soul”:
‘The death of the soul.’The words attached themselves to some scene, to some room,
to some past he had been dreaming of. It became clearer; the scene, the room, the past
he had been dreaming of.
It was at Bourton that summer, early in the nineties, when he was so passionately in
love with Clarissa. There were a great many people there, laughing and talking, sitting
round a table after tea, and the room was bathed in yellow light and full of cigarette
smoke. (MD, 66)
There have been attempts also in films to depict stream-of-consciousness, for example
by the French Impressionists, who conveyed discontinuity by telling the story as a series of
brief flashes. René Clair’s Entr’Acte (1924) contains impressionist montage sequences.
(Valkola 1993, 47) A common conception is that the novel is more appropriate to the
presentation of inner mental states than the film, which, on the other hand, depicts better what
people do and say. Likewise, it has been claimed that mental states
imagination
memory, dream,
cannot be as adequately represented by film as by language. According to this
conception film cannot render thought and thought externalized in space is no longer thought.
Morris Beja objects these claims by saying that putting words on pages is also an act of
externalization and that thought is not necessarily only verbal. (Beja 1979, 57) Indeed, it is
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possible to represent mental states through images, or with a combination of all the artistic
devices used in films. For instance, verbal means such as the voice-over19, narration, and
dialogue are used to solve a fundamental limitation within the visual image, in other words,
the difficulty of conveying abstract concepts. Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries uses
extensively the voice-over, but it presents visually the flashbacks and silent dreams of the
protagonist Isak Borg. (Ibid. 58) According to Jörn Donner (1962, 127), Wild Strawberries is
a film in novel form, and it frees film art from conventional dramatic structure and the
naturalistic development of events. The film’s time conception, as Donner points out, has its
roots in Strindberg, Proust, Joyce and Faulkner. Bergman’s film uses interior monologue and
the Bergsonian time conception, Surrealism, dreams, mind’s associations and disassociations.
(Ibid.)
Sergei Eisenstein, who was interested in adapting Ulysses into film, believed that film,
even more strongly than literature, could make the associative processes of the stream of
consciousness accessible, comprehensible and vivid (Beja 1979, 58). As the discussion
above shows, a flexible arrangement and fusion of the past, the present and the future typical
of the stream-of-consciousness novel can be accomplished also by means of different
cinematic devices. Both in modernist literature and modern cinema since the 1960s there has
been a trend toward seeing and representing the existence as fragmented and discontinuous.
For example Alain Robbe-Grillet explains his and Alain Resnais’ conception of the
fragmented reality and temporal fusion in Last Year in Marienbad as follows: “the total
cinema of our mind admits both in alternation and to the same degree the present fragments
19
Voice-over is the voice of a narrator, or a character who may be in the shot but who is not talking aloud, heard
off-screen ”over”the visuals (Beja 1979, 316).
76
of reality proposed by sight and hearing, and past fragments, or future fragments that are
completely phantasmagoric”(Beja 1979, 76).
This fragmented narration and representation of time in film is very close to the
Woolfian narrative technique. Woolf discusses in her essay “The Cinema” (1926) the
possibilities of cinema to present contrasts “with a speed which the writer can only toil after
in vain” (Woolf 1966b, 272). She compares film to dreams in its flexibility to present
different images. When Woolf explains how “the past could be controlled, distances
annihilated, and the gulfs which dislocate novels [… ] could by the sameness of background,
by the repetition of some scene, be smoothed away.”With these words she in fact explains
the possibilities of the montage technique. The development of the new art form inspired also
Bergson to compare the mechanism of our ordinary consciousness with cinema: “Le
mécanisme de notre connaissance usuelle est de nature cinématographique”(Bergson 1963,
753). In his Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution) he explains how the cinematograph
creates an impression of continuous movement out of a series of static images. Likewise, the
flux of images in Woolf’s novels runs fast like images in a reel of film. Sometimes the images
may be freezed for a while when “time stands still,” or when a character experiences an
epiphanic moment, but thereafter the flux of images continues.
The inspiration of the Bergsonian time conception can be found in modernist painting
as well, even though painting is not characteristically a time-art. According to Butler (1994,
142), the idea that a work of visual art could express this kind of temporal process came to
French art criticism with early Cubist painting. The Futurists’passion for movement and
change for their own sake derived from Bergson, who at that time was popular among the
advanced intelligentsia of Italy (Osborne, 1981, 210). For example, the Futurists attempted in
their urban visions to imply the Bergsonian processes of memory by making spatial
77
equivalents for psychic duration. As an example of these attempts is Luigi Russolo’s painting
Memories of a Night (Ricordi di una notte) (1911). Russolo represents memory and dream by
superimposing incompatible images of an implied consciousness within the same pictorial
space. The consciousness is that of a young woman whose face appears at the upper left and
in profile on the right. The temporal succession in the thoughts of the woman is indicated by
the rising sun above and the electric lights below. Associations and memories in her
consciousness are represented by different images: a group of men, a running horse, shadowy
houses, and elongated figures walking through the streets. (Butler 1994, 143) In my reading,
the attempt to depict consciousness in this painting is clumsy and it is difficult for the
spectator to understand the purposes of the artist. On the whole, the stream-of-consciousness
novel and the film represent the Bergsonian free flow of consciousness and the fusion of
temporal dimensions more convincingly and naturally than the Futurist painting.
The Futurists borrowed from the Cubists their techniques of interpenetrating planes
and simultaneous presentation of multiple viewpoints, but they used them for the purpose of
suggesting movement and change, which differed from the Cubists’original ideas (Osborne
1981, 211). It is easy to agree with Christopher Butler (1994, 152) when he says that free
associationist psychology of early modernism was more important to the Futurists than the
abstraction of Cubism. In Cubism the idea of simultaneity and multiple perspectives, which I
will discuss in the following chapter, is more important than the representation of movement,
the Bergsonian time, and the consciousness with its free order of temporal dimensions.
To conclude this discussion of the representations of the dimensions of time in Woolf
and different forms of the visual arts, we may take a brief look at Joseph Frank’s essay
“Spatial Form in Modern Literature”(1945) where we find a connecting thought between
modernist literature and painting in the lack of depth (i.e. flatness) of painting and the lack of
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historical depth of modernist literature. Joseph Frank argues that “by the juxtaposition of past
and present history becomes ahistorical” and “time is no longer felt an objective, causal
progression with clearly marked out differences between periods” (1963, 59). With these
words Frank describes modernist literary works that have the same kind of time structures as
Virginia Woolf’s modernist novels, e.g. Proust, Joyce, Pound, and Djuna Barnes’Nightwood.
In this timelessness Frank finds a parallel with the plastic arts by arguing that “just as the
dimension of depth has vanished from the sphere of visual creation, so the dimension of
historical depth has vanished from the content of the major works of modern literature”
(ibid.). Frank explains that the act of juxtaposition eliminates “any feeling of sequence”and
that “past and present are apprehended spatially.” In a similar vein, in Woolf’s modernist
novels where she fuses the temporal dimensions, as we have seen in the above analysis,
historical depth has disappeared in most of her modernist novels (except in Orlando, and to
some extent in Between the Acts) and they may, indeed, be understood spatially, in other
words, space has replaced historical time. This fusion of the past, present and future is,
however, only one aspect of the spatiality in the modern novel, which I will discuss more
thoroughly in the next chapter on simultaneity and multiple perspectives.
5. Simultaneity and Multiple Perspectives
In the traditional novel the representation of simultaneous events and experiences is not a
common practice, because the novel concentrates usually on one point of view and because
the main interest of the novelist is to narrate a story. However, Flaubert’s county fair scene in
Madame Bovary serves as an example of the representation of simultaneous perceptions in a
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nineteenth century Realist novel. Joseph Frank (1963, 14-15) calls Flaubert’s method
cinematographic: a method in which Flaubert cuts back and forth between the various levels
of action. In the modernist novel the action takes place during a short period of time, usually
a day, which often entails different locations, or different consciousnesses. In the
stream-of-consciousness novel there are many point of views, and usually simultaneous
events or thoughts are represented. But since language is linear and proceeds in time, the
writer has to invent techniques and devices to create an illusion of simultaneity of several
incidents or simultaneous thoughts by different people.
Different forms of art
poetry, prose, painting and cinema
represent simultaneous
events or experiences, and this is not just a modernist preoccupation, although the interest in
simultanist techniques is central to the modernism of the pre-war period. According to
Christpher Butler (1994, 158), the simultanist techniques of modernism aimed at disrupting
the conventional view of reality by causing surprise. Within modernism the interpretation of
collective states of consciousness grew in importance under the influence of the sociology of
Durkheim and the depth psychology of Jung and his theories of the archetypes of the
collective unconscious. In modernist poetry states and events beyond the speaker can be
presented as if they were in simultaneous interpenetration, independent of any single source
of perception or observation. (Ibid. 158-9)
Also Virginia Woolf has done experiments on simultanist techniques in some of her
novels, perhaps in Mrs Dalloway they are best exemplified. Sue Roe (2000, 179) also points
out that “Virginia Woolf was working towards a kind of simultanism in Jacob’s Room by
opening out contrasting glimpses, one after another.”Virginia Woolf, as Roe notes (ibid.)
found a narrative equivalent for simultanism in Dorothy Richardson’s novel Pilgrimage. In a
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review of Richardson’s book Tunnel Woolf admires her method of writing, the depiction of
Miriam Henderson’s consciousness:
The reader is not provided with a story; he is invited to embed himself in Miriam
Henderson’s consciousness, to register one after another, and one on top of another,
words, cries, shouts, notes of a violin, fragments of lectures, to follow these
impressions as they flicker through Miriam’s mind [… ] (Woolf 1979, 189).
Woolf describes in the review also the simultaneity of different places in the consciousness
of Miriam: “We find ourselves in the dentist’s room, in the street, in the lodging-house
bedroom frequently and convincingly; but never, or only for a tantalizing second, in the
reality which underlies these appearances” (ibid. 190) In this depiction of Miriam’s
consciousness in Richardson’s novel the reader is in a sense in several places simultaneously
when the different scenes of different places intermingle in the character’s consciousness.
This is one case of simultaneity. Woolf uses in Mrs Dalloway another type of simultaneity,
which is the simultaneity of several characters’experiences of the same events by means of
juxtaposition of the different consciousnesses.
The idea of simultanism, however, may have come to Woolf from the French painter
Jacques Raverat who suggested it in his letters to her by the time she was writing Mrs
Dalloway. In their correspondence they discussed how difficult it is to express simultaneity
in literature, which is easily available to painters. Raverat saw the difficulty about writing in
its linearity: “Surely, when you are writing you are not clearly conscious on Page 259 of what
there was on Page 31? But perhaps that’s only because I’m not a writer, & in fact do not
naturally think in words”(quoted in Bell 1982, 106). Raverat suggested to Woolf painterly
ideas of simultaneity so that she could avoid what she called the “formal railway line of
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sentence” (see Bell 1982, 106; Higdon 1977, 128). Cubism, which questions the fixed
viewpoint, is an example of the use of simultanism in painting. According to Sue Roe,
cubism challenged the old idea that the viewer’s eye, when looking at a painting, moves
through time. Instead, seeing becomes incompatible with the idea of an image produced
“instantly,”as in photography. (Roe 2000, 190)
In literature, the easiest way to indicate that two or several events or experiences are
simultaneous is to use a narrator who is telling the reader that the events take place
simultaneously. But since the stream-of-consciousness novel depicts the inner reality by
trying to give an impression that there is no narrator,20 simultaneity must be expressed by
means of different literary devices. One of these devices in Mrs Dalloway (pp. 16-20) is the
use of the motor car of a royal person, or the Prime Minister (his identity is unknown). The
car moves in different parts of London and the people gathered along the streets watch it
passing. The novelist changes the focus from person to person, or rather from mind to mind,
and because all these people watching the car have observations and thoughts about the car,
the reader knows that these events or thoughts are taking place simultaneously. An effect of
simultaneity of several events can be created in cinema with a moving camera, which in film
technique is known by the name camera drive, or by means of montage, in other words, by
showing alternately different persons watching the car proceeding. In films, however, the
20
The point of view used by Virginia Woolf in her stream-of-consiousness novels has been called “multiple
selective omniscience”by Norman Friedman. This technique gives the impression that the character is talking
in the first person and in the present tense, although grammatically the text may be in the third person, past tense.
(Cf. Friedman 1975, 152-153). Another term frequently used of Virginia Woolf’s writing technique is indirect
interieur monologue (cf. Humphrey, 1955, p. 30) or narrated monologue (cf. Uspensky 1983, 42). Woolf
combines also other techniques of the stream of consciousness with indirect interior monologue; mostly it is
combined with direct monologue and in The Waves she uses the soliloquy as a stream-of-consciousness
technique (Humphrey, 1955, 29-30, 37).
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spectator cannot “see”the thoughts unless the director uses other means besides images, such
as the voice-over, to tell the characters’thoughts.
Since Mrs Dalloway has two protagonists, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren
Smith, who do not meet each other in the novel, they have to be presented separately and
depicted in different places at the beginning of the novel. But because Woolf wants to draw
parallels21 between these two characters and to show them living in London at the same time,
walking the same streets but not meeting each other, Woolf places them on the same location
to observe the same thing, the passing of an important vehicle. Through this enlarged
description of a short moment, which is in fact a depiction of different consciousnesses, she
offers her reader several points of view of the incident instead of only one in the manner of
the traditional novel. Critics have been eager to read thematic meanings in this parallelism of
Clarissa and Septimus. It is true that Clarissa and Septimus have many things in common: it
has been pointed out that they both cite Shakespeare (Jensen 1983, 171), but what is more
important is that they are both disappointed in their love lives. According to Emily Jensen
(ibid.), Septimus has lost his loved one, a man called Evans, and with it his ability to feel and
to love. Moreover, he has become shell-shocked in the war. But also Clarissa is suffering in
her loveless marriage, because as a young woman she was in love with a woman called Sally
Seton, but she chose to marry Richard Dalloway for the sake of social norms. In her
outwardly happy, well-to-do life Clarissa, who leads a loveless life, may be almost as
desperate as Septimus who ends his life by jumping out of the window. We may draw a
parallel between Septimus’s physical suicide and Clarissa’s metaphoric suicide, her loveless
life with Richard Dalloway. (Ibid 162-179)
21
Virginia Woolf intended Septimus to be Mrs Dalloway’s double (see Velicu 1985, 44).
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The technique of observing an object or event from many angles simultaneously is also
a device used by the Cubist painters. The Cubist painter, however, is more interested in the
depicted object, e.g. a vase or a man, than in the viewers of the object, whereas in Mrs
Dalloway, the observers of the motorcar and their different interpretations of the situation are
more important and interesting from the reader’s point of view than the motorcar. The painter
is interested in showing the different sides of the vase or the man, its front and back, how it
looks from the ground and from the sky, all at the same time.
As Boris Uspensky (1983, 2) notes, in painting and in other visual arts point of view is
primarily connected with perspective. In European painting since the Renaissance linear
perspective, a single static point of view, has been a norm. In visual art, point of view refers
to the viewing position of the spectator of a work of art, which may be internal or external.
The internal observer is located within the represented world and the external observer is
located outside the represented world. In the case of linear perspective the observer is looking
at the picture from the outside, the picture is seen as a view from a window, and thus the point
of view of the spectator may be considered as corresponding to that of the artist. On the other
hand, in ancient representations and medieval art the artist placed himself in the centre of the
represented space. (Ibid. 134-135) Mieke Bal uses the term focalization and focalizor in
analyzing visual images by means of narratological concepts. According to Bal (1997b, 146),
“focalization is the relationship between the ‘vision,’the agent that sees, and that which is
seen.”The focalizor is the point from which the elements are viewed (ibid.). In narratology
focalizor is not necessarily identified by the narrator, but it is possible to have also a
character-bound or a spectator-bound focalizor in literary or visual narratives. Like Gérard
Genette (cf. 1972, 206-7), also Bal distinguishes between internal and external focalization
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(ibid. 148). According to her, in internal focalization a character participates in the fabula22
as an actor, in external focalization an anonymous agent situated outside the fabula is
functioning as a focalizor. Tutta Palin (2004, 286) points out that in a representational visual
image focalization need not be based on a character’s gaze. Also other elements such as
perspective and the direction of light may focus the spectator’s gaze and in a picture there
may be more than one focalizor (ibid.).
Also in modern art the distortions of linear perspective is a common practice, and like
ancient art, modernist art often represents the depicted views or objects flat. In a painting it is
difficult to depict simultaneity of experiences of different people by means of perspective,
whereas in literature you may create an illusion of simultaneity by changing the point of view
and referring in the narrative (or narrated monologue) to the same point of time and/or the
same place, for example as it has been done in Mrs Dalloway. As the Cubist examples above
show, different perspectives in pictorial art are manifested mostly in the forms of the depicted
objects and in the position of the spectator or artist.
In Margaret Church’s (1963, 92) opinion the car in Mrs Dalloway is a unifying device
which relates all the characters of the novel. On the other hand, it is also a means to indicate
simultaneity of events and thoughts, and the sameness of place: the unity of time and space.
In Mrs Dalloway (pp. 23-4) there is another device comparable to the motor car: an
aeroplane flying over London which the characters are watching. The aeroplane scene is
even a better example of a technique of creating an effect of simultaneity, because all the
characters are able to see it exactly at the same time in the sky, even in places distant from
each other. The aeroplane again functions as a unifier of people who are watching it, for it
22
A fabula is a series of logically or chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors. A
story is a fabula which is presented in a certain manner. (Bal 1997b, 5)
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gives them all a new experience and wakes them up from their daily routines. The aeroplane,
like the motor car, besides symbolizing people’s unity is also a structural device marking
simultaneity. In her novels Virginia Woolf often dispels the isolation and loneliness of her
characters by making them share a common experience. For example, this incident of the
aeroplane writing with smoke some message in the sky gives the people simultaneously
some kind of hope or promise, an answer to their secret wishes.
Michael Whithworth proposes (2000, 146) that the aeroplane scene unites a disparate
group of characters and raises the issue of the nature of the crowd in the urban environment.
And most importantly, as Whithworth explains, the aeroplane scene suggests many
perspectives that are relevant to Woolf’s modernism: intellectual, technological, social and
literary. According to Whithworth (ibid.), the aeroplane suggests that modernism was also a
response to technological innovation, as the following extract from Mrs Dalloway shows
with its references to Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory:
Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration;
a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of
turf at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr Bentley, sweeping
round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought,
Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory [… ] (MD, 32)
The aeroplane and the car create effects or illusions of simultaneity, because in
literature you cannot really present various events or experiences simultaneously due to the
fact that language and reading are consecutive by their nature (cf. previous chapter). In
painting, however, it is easier to create an illusion of simultaneity, because its primary
illusion is space. The spectator of a painting is able to perceive the whole painting almost
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simultaneously and also the events in one scene of a painting are interpreted by the viewer to
be simultaneous. In painting it is as difficult as in literature to represent various incidents or
scenes taking place at the same time. For that reason in painting, too, you have to create
illusions of simultaneity by different devices. In Cubism the interest in simultaneity lies not
in presenting two or more events or persons simultaneously, but in the observation of the
spectator, his possibility to see an object from various perspectives simultaneously. This is of
course impossible in reality, but the Cubist painting at least attempted to depict the world
realistically through an intellectualized vision. 23 According to the ideas of Cubism, the
spectator of a Cubist painting is in movement; he/she perceives the object from all possible
angles while he/she is moving around it. You may argue, however, that the way in which the
Cubists depicted their objects is far from realistic, as Joseph Frank does by noting that in the
work of Braque, the Fauves and the Cubists the naturalistic principle has lost its dominance
(Frank 1963, 28).
The fragmented, distorted figures of Picasso and Bracque do not correspond to our
conception of realistic art created according to the principle of verisimilitude and they do not
look like the objects they represent. The Cubists wanted to challenge the conventional
Western notion of art and the Renaissance perspective, which according to them had been
considered the only alternative of “looking” at the world. The same way as the Cubists,
modernist literature was breaking the centuries-old conventions and self-evident truths of
narration, point of view, language and style. However, Joseph Frank (1963, 28) argues that
Proust and Joyce are still loyal to the naturalistic principle the same way as for instance
23
The Cubists represent real objects and depict them as they are known, but it is clear that physical perception
does not function this way. The Cubists memorize different sides and perspectives of the object and depict them
all simultaneously. Thus Cubism is not an optical and Impressionistic realism, but a conceptual realism.
(Chilvers and Osborne 1988, 129)
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Cézanne, presenting their characters in terms of commonplace details, descriptions of
circumstance and environment usually regarded as verisimilar. Similarly, we may argue that
Virginia Woolf in most of her novels is following the principle of verisimilitude, but in her
case this is not the whole truth, for in Orlando fantastic elements break the naturalistic
principle.
In painting, according to Rakel Kallio (1991, 660), there were several different
attempts to represent simultaneity besides Cubism. Even a term called simultanism was
coined by Robert Delaunay for his colour method by which he tried in 1912-1913 to create
impressions of space and forms in a picture. This period is known in art history by the name
Orfism. Delaunay borrowed the term from M.-E. Chevreuil, whose work on colour
harmonies and simultaneous contrasts has been a guide to Post-Impressionists as well. The
idea of Delaunay was that the form and movement in a picture should be based entirely on
colours and colour contrasts, which would be observed simultaneously. (Ibid. 660)
On the other hand, the Futurists understood by simultaneity in painting the
simultaneous depiction of memories and the present moment in the same picture, i.e. the
Bergsonian durée. The Futurists exalted the dynamism and simultaneity of modern life,
which was an interest shared widely in the milieu of the avant-garde with the rise of new
technologies and forms of mass-entertainment
the automobile, aviation, electric lighting,
cinema, cycling, team sports (Cottington 1998, 47-48). In Mrs Dalloway there are signs of
this interest in the urban dynamism and modern technologies (automobiles and aeroplanes)
as well as the interest in the depiction of simultaneity, as the analysis above shows. The
meaning of the term ‘simultaneity’for the Futurist painters in 1912 was “the simultaneity of
states of mind in a work of art”and the picture was supposed to be “the synthesis of what one
remembers and what one sees” (ibid. 48), which is very close to the aims of the
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stream-of-consciousness writers and for example Mrs Dalloway exemplifies amazingly well
these purposes.
Interestingly, there is a similarity between Mrs Dalloway and Robert Delaunay’s
painting Tour Eiffel from 1910 (painted much earlier than Mrs Dalloway appeared), a subject
to which he returned many times. Both works emphasizing the collective metropolitan
identity present an object simultaneously visible to all inhabitants of the city, the Eiffel
Tower in Paris and the aeroplane in London. In Mrs Dalloway there are also other objects
that create collective, simultaneous experience for the city dwellers: the motor car and the
public clocks in London, especially Big Ben, whose sound is heard simultaneously by all
Londoners. The clocks are used structurally in the novel to indicate the passage of time, to
notify the reader what time of day it is. On the other hand, the clocks indicate that different
people are in different places at the same time. The next passage exemplifies the simultaneity
of the experiences of Clarissa and Septimus which the announcement of time by Big Ben
emphasizes:
It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben; whose stroke was wafted over the
northern part of London; blent with that of the other clocks, mixed in a thin ethereal
way with the clouds and wisps of smoke and died up there among the seagulls
twelve o’clock struck as Clarissa Dalloway laid her green dress on her bed, and
Warren Smiths walked down Harley Street. Twelve was the hour of their appointment.
Probably, Rezia thought, that was Sir William Bradshaw’s house with the grey motor
car in front of it. (The leaden circles dissolved in the air). (MD, 104)
Besides the symbol of collective experience, the Eiffel Towerr, there is in Delaunay’s picture
a painterly issue concerning simultaneity that has a close affinity with Woolf’s structural
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experimentation. Both works are juxtaposing different perspectives and thus attempting to
create the reader/spectator an illusion of simultaneity. The distortions of perspective which
Tour Eiffel manifested were Delaunay’s response to the ideas of the Futurists and the poetry
of Jules Romain, who also attempted to capture the immediate experiences of the teeming
metropolis that bound its inhabitants together (Cottington 1998, 48-52). In Tour Eiffel the
tower is seen simultaneously from different perspectives: the top of the tower is seen from
the air and the base is seen from the ground. The juxtaposed views suggest its simultaneous
visibility to all the city’s inhabitants. In the Tour Eiffel painting the issue of perspective may
be interpreted as concerning multiple internal viewers who are looking at the represented
object from different perspectives. Here the focus is not only on the depicted object, i.e. the
Eiffel Tower, but also on the viewers or the simultaneity of their viewing experience.
Delaunay, however, was not the first to present such perspectival juxtapositions in
painting. Picasso and Braque had already in their paintings of 1907-8 used similar devices
their aim being most of all to challenge the conventionality of painting, even though a
contemporary critic and artist Jean Metzinger understood them to represent Bergson’s notion
of duration, the successive and the simultaneous (see Cottington 1998, 52). The Cubists were
not, however, so much interested in the collectivist ideas or philosophical aspects as with
purely painterly interests and experimentation with form. In Woolf’s work both these
concerns are combined: she shows an interest in both the “collective experiences” with
philosophical, Bergsonian connections and formal experimentation.
In To the Lighthouse the concept of simultaneity has symbolic connotations. Structural
as well as symbolic simultaneity can be detected in the third part of the novel. This part of the
book is divided into thirteen chapters. In the first two chapters Lily Briscoe, Mr Ramsay and
his two children Cam and James have gathered together in the deserted Ramsay house after
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ten years’absence and separation from each other, and Mr Ramsay together with his children
is planning an expedition to the lighthouse situated on a tiny island.
The eleven subsequent chapters of the “The Lighthouse”section of the novel compose
a description of simultaneity by juxtaposing two experiences and two locations. In every
second chapter Mr Ramsay and his children are in a boat on the sea approaching the
lighthouse, and respectively in every second chapter Lily Briscoe is on the shore finishing her
painting, i.e. reaching her aim, her “lighthouse.” This juxtaposition technique is familiar
from cinematic language, i.e. changing the view alternately by means of montage. The
culmination of the two juxtaposed experiences in the “lighthouse”episode is the simultaneity
of the reaching of the lighthouse by Mr Ramsay with his children and the completion of the
painting by Lily Briscoe. Perhaps Virginia Woolf has not planned this simultaneity only for
the sake of formal experimentation, for in this simultaneity it is easy to see symbolic
connotations. The simultaneous reaching of the lighthouse and the completion of the painting
may be understood as symbolizing the sameness and parallelism between life (symbolized by
the reaching of the lighthouse) and art (symbolized by the completion of the painting). Their
parallelism is further emphasized by the similarity of Lily’s two comments in the last short
chapter, when she, while looking at the lighthouse, realizes that Mr Ramsay has reached the
lighthouse:
‘He has landed,’she said aloud. ‘It is finished.’(TL, 236)
This comment is a reference to Mr Ramsay and the reaching of the lighthouse, but with the
following comment she refers to her painting:
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It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme
fatigue, I have had my vision. (TL, 237)
This symbolical parallelism and simultaneity could mean that Lily has finally found herself
as an artist, understood the relationship between life and art, their inseparability, life (the
memory of Mrs Ramsay) giving a vision to art. At the same time also Mr Ramsay realizes
that Mrs Ramsay was right: one should be more understanding towards other people. So Mr
Ramsay finally after all these years discards his self-centered attitude and consents to go to
the lighthouse with his children.
In Between the Acts there are further connotations of simultaneity. It is a matter of
interpretation whether you consider the fantasy events of the play and the watching
experience by the audience two simultaneous events. In a way the audience is living in the
world of the play, but on the other hand, the watchers are living in their private worlds
simultaneously as they are entering into the events of the play. The title of the novel itself,
Between the Acts, already suggests two worlds, the world between the acts and the acts
themselves. Structurally Woolf indicates simultaneity by juxtaposing parts of the play with
the remarks or thoughts of the members of the audience. This juxtaposition could also
suggest that in people there exist simultaneously two worlds: concrete reality and
imagination.
This kind of simultaneity differs from the ones in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,
where there are two or more events disconnected from one another, situated in different
locations, whereas in Between the Acts the experiences take place at the same place. However,
there is a symbolic meaning in this simultaneity as well. Since the play represents different
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phases of history, the simultaneity of different dimensions of time, the coexistence of the past
and the present could also be read as the Bergsonian durée.
Between the Acts has a loose structure in comparison with Mrs Dalloway, To the
Lighthouse and The Waves. James Naremore (1973, 220) has pointed out how the
idiosyncratic and artful transitions that can be found everywhere in Mrs Dalloway, To the
Lighthouse and The Waves are absent in Between the Acts. Instead, in Naremore’s opinion
(ibid.), it has a disjointed character which is characteristic of modernist classics such as The
Waste Land and Ulysses. Between the Acts (like Jacob’s Room) is composed of fragments,
small scenes that are put together in a seemingly haphazard way, as if there was no advanced
plan by the author, and so they resemble more real life than works of art. In Between the Acts
Woolf cuts from person to person before the play begins, during the performance, and after
the curtain falls. She uses in the novel the same kind of fragmentary montage technique that
is a common practice in films. Woolf and the films both show the reader/viewer small
episodes depicting the characters’lives, dialogues or thoughts taking place simultaneously in
different places.
In Between the Acts Woolf presents again her idea of unity between people. The
audience of the pageant is supposed to share a common experience and find harmony by
watching the play together, at least for a moment, before they split up again. This attempt to
create a feeling of unity, however, proves to be unsuccessful. The director of the play Miss
La Trobe calls it a failure, because the audience does not understand the message or meaning
of the play. The writer and director of the play may be understood as the alter ego of Virginia
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Woolf herself, 24 since in all her novels Woolf has been looking for unity between people and
in this last novel she as a writer may be thought to fail in this respect as well. Alex Zwerdling
(1986, 312) supports this reading by stating that it is “a distortion to read Between the Acts as
essentially celebratory work affirming unity and continuity.” The loose, fragmentary
structure of the novel fits well with the thought that Woolf has lost her belief in the possibility
of unity and spiritual connection between people. The novel is written on the eve of the
Second World War, which confirms the reading that unity is impossible in a world where
people are going to destroy each other. The words “orts, scraps and fragments”uttered in the
play are all that Isa remembers of the play, and also the reader’s impression of Between the
Acts is “orts, scraps and fragments”after closing the book. The unity which Woolf had been
looking for in most of her previous novels and is still looking for in this last novel (or is she?)
is more like a wish that will remain unaccomplished.
In The Waves as well we may find cases of simultaneity, for example a simultaneity of
different time structures. The novel has a twofold structure: on the one hand, it is organized
by the principle of one day, on the other hand, it is the description of a lifetime of six persons.
The interludes describing nature and the movements of the sun all put together cover the span
of one day, while the rest of the text between these interludes covers the lifetime of the
characters from childhood to old age. There are correspondences between these two time
structures, i.e. early morning in nature corresponds to childhood in human life and evening
equals old age. This structure of the novel emphasizes the fact that people have
simultaneously two cycles of time on which they are dependent. There is yet another type of
24
Another connection to Woolf as a writer, as Pamela J. Transue notes (1989, 176), is the fact that Miss La
Trobe falls into depression and despair when the performance is over, like Woolf did after finishing her novels.
Also Sue Roe (1990, 160) claims that in the character of Miss La Trobe there is much in common with Woolf,
for example, in her determination to break new artistic ground, her compulsion to innovate and her intense
personal involvement in her work.
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simultaneity in the novel: the six major characters are approximately the same age and live
their lives also at the same time, side by side. Virginia Woolf meant these six characters to be
one (see Velicu 1985, 89) stressing the sameness and unity of human experience. She tells
the lives of these characters through their thoughts, by means of soliloquies with very little
insertions by the narrator (only the comments usual in plays and dialogues, i.e. “said Susan“).
The narrative creates a schizophrenic feeling in the reader’s mind, because all the thoughts of
the six persons are intermingled in such a way that it is impossible to form a clear picture of
their lives and their characters. Woolf seems to say that people have two different realities
simultaneously: the detachedness of the individual mind and the connection with the
community of other people, which both make up the human experience of life:
We have come together (from the North, from the South, from Susan’s farm, from
Louis’house of business) to make one thing, not enduring
for what endures?
but
seen by many eyes simultaneously. There is a red carnation in that vase. A single
flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce,
purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves
a whole flower to which every eye
brings its own contribution. (W, 85)
The Waves offers the reader six different viewpoints, six different aspects of life. It is in a
sense like a Cubist painting, which enables the spectator to see different sides of the
represented object, with the difference that in a Cubist painting it may be assumed that there
is involved only one focalizor whose intellectualized vision is represented in the painting. In
The Waves, on the contrary, there are six “focalizors”and six different “visions”of the world.
The Waves and a Cubist painting have in common the fragmentation of form, the
juxtaposition of forms and images in space. For the spectator a Cubist painting is difficult to
understand as a representation of real objects or people, and the reader may have problems in
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imagining or visualizing The Waves, because both works are conceptualized art, or art for
art’s sake: they both approach “abstract art” in which meaning comes chiefly through
aesthetic form.
The Cubist painting (Picasso, Braque, Villon, Metzinger) depicts external reality,
objects and their structural relations, while The Waves describes inner reality of the
characters. There were, however, exceptions to the Cubist practices, for instance Marcel
Duchamp depicted subjects as he experienced them in his inner world. Duchamp took his
subjects from his own life; they were memories or fantasized events. (Hautamäki 1997, 21)
Like Woolf, Duchamp was interested in mind time or experienced time in the Bergsonian
sense. Duchamp made a distinction between a picture’s appearance and inner apparition,
and sought for a suitable technique to present his apparitions, but had to admit that it is
difficult to express them in a painting (ibid. 21-22). According to Irmeli Hautamäki (ibid. 21),
in his Cubist self-portraits Nu (esquisse), jeune homme triste dans un train (1911-1912) and
Nu descendant l’escalier (1912) Duchamp argued against the Cubists. The Cubists’
conception of time differs from Duchamp’s: in their art conception the spectator is in
movement picking different aspects and making observations of the object and then
combining them in the picture. Thus the painting has several perspectival vanishing points,
instead of only one. In Duchamp’s pictures the method is reverse: the spectator stays still
while the subject is in movement. There is no longer a perspectival, pictural space in the
painting. Duchamp’s Cubist self-portraits imitate cinema and look like Etienne-Jules
Marey’s time photograph series depicting for example the movements of a running person.
(Ibid.) In Duchamp’s paintings and Marey’s photographs there is yet another interpretation
of the notion of simultaneity: the simultaneity of movements which are “frozen”and made
visible in the picture.
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The collage technique 25 used in paintings, photographs and films is a method of
representing simultaneous events or phenomena in the same painting. In films you can either
juxtapose several (moving) images in a shot, or use montage to juxtapose consecutive images,
thereby giving the spectator an illusion of simultaneity. When the montage technique is used
in films the spectator understands easily that the juxtaposed images are supposed to be taking
place at the same time, because there is action in these images. In a painting or a
photomontage you have to use additional devices to indicate simultaneity of actions, for
example by means of a title.
Although Woolf and other modernist writers create spatial form by using techniques of
juxtaposition, montage and other literary, painterly and cinematic devices, the spatial-form
narrative is also a “creation” by the reader. As Jeffrey R. Smitten (1981, 21) suggests,
“spatial-form narratives place a greater burden on the reader’s synthetizing power than do
more conventional temporal narratives.” The reader has to work out the syntax of the
narrative and create a visual image in his/her mind in order to grasp space, the novel’s
secondary illusion. According to Mikkonen (2005, 226), in spatial form the text makes the
reader consider simultaneously aspects of the world or characters which have been depicted
in stages. In many of Virginia Woolf’s novels fragmentation and juxtapositions create in the
reader’s imagination the same kind of effects as the viewer of a painting has, for example, the
reader can “perceive”simultaneously many parts of the image, and the novel is concentrating
on descriptions of places and things that may be “seen” instead of plots developing in
sequence. Both in modernist painting and modernist literature you can “see the view”from
many perspectives at the same time. This also creates an effect of spatiality in the reader’s
25
In literature and films the term “montage”is used instead of “collage.”
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mind. Especially Mrs Dalloway is a good example of spatial form; it not only creates the
effects of space of paintings, but also those of the spatiality of films, a possibility to be
simultaneously in many places. Nevertheless, literature always has to be satisfied only with a
representation of space, because space is not part of its essence, i.e. the linear verbal language.
Literature speaks of space, describes places, buildings, landscapes, and therefore these
spaces exist only in the imagination of the writer or the reader. As Genette notes, painting is a
spatial art because the representation of a painting takes place in space (i.e. the canvas).
Architecture, on the other hand, does not speak of space, it actually is space. (Genette 1969,
44)
To summarize, nearly all the cases of simultaneity in Woolf’s novels are part of the
modernist experimentation in the form of the novel, but in Woolf’s fiction these structural
devices have thematic and symbolic content as well, while in the visual arts, e.g. in Cubist
and Futurist works of art, the formal or technical experimentation is the main concern.
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PART THREE
THE ART OF SUGGESTION
6. The Symbolic Mode
In his article “The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy” (1978,
483-484) David Lodge discusses Roman Jakobson’s distinction between metonymy and
metaphor in literary language. Jakobson suggests that realistic writing is metonymic,
whereas Romantic and Symbolist writing is metaphoric. Since modern fiction is generally
thought to have a Symbolist bias, it is nearer to metaphor than metonymy. The latter in
Jakobson’s theory is a characteristic feature of the traditional novel. Even the titles of the
novels, as Lodge suggests, prove this to be true: the moderns favoured metaphoric or
quasi-metaphoric titles, e.g. Heart of Darkness, The Wings of the Dove, A Passage to India,
The Rainbow, Parade’s End, To the Lighthouse, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake. (Ibid.) We could
add to this list of metaphoric titles Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, The Voyage Out, Night and
Day, Jacob’s Room, Between the Acts.
According to Melvin J. Friedman, the novels of Henry James, Marcel Proust, James
Conrad, William Faulkner, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are in some sense fictional
inheritances from French Symbolist poetry. The Symbolist novel, as Friedman calls the
modernist novel, is characterized by fragmented narrative that is connected through images
and symbols rather than exterior events. (Friedman 1981, 453) But also Symbolism and
Surrealism have a common ground: they are both concerned with subjective experience and
the unconscious. Virginia Woolf’s fiction has some things in common with both of these
artistic movements, for instance the interest in subjectivity and inner experience. Like in
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Symbolism and Surrealism, there is something inexplainable and mysterious in her novels. In
Woolf’s fiction you can sense the suggestiveness of Symbolism which is communicated by
means of symbols and metaphors.
In the same vein as Virginia Woolf, the Symbolist painters such as Edward Munch,
Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh26 emphasized the priority of suggestion and evocation
over direct representation and explicit meaning. Her use of symbols and poetic forms is also
akin to the devices used by the Symbolists. Stylistically, the Symbolist painters differed
greatly. Many artists were inspired by the same kind of imagery as the Symbolist writers, for
example the theme of the femme fatale, but Gauguin and his followers chose much more
down-to-earth subjects, e.g. peasant scenes (Chilvers & Osborne 1988, 484). In fact, it is not
easy to find thematic sameness for instance in the Symbolist paintings by Gustave Moreau or
Odilon Redon and Virginia Woolf’s fiction. The similarity lies rather in the atmosphere and
modernist language than in the subjects. There is a consistent occurrence of symbols and
archetypal imagery in Woolf’s novels, especially in To the Lighthouse and The Waves.
In the visual art, according to Bonelius (2004, 27), there are two kinds of symbols:
those with culturally determined fixed meanings and those with personal meanings. In older
art, religious symbols have particular conventional meanings. Especially art in the Middle
Ages was rich in pictorial emblems, and the paintings were read as narratives. Typical
symbols in pictures with the Virgin Mary are a book symbolizing wisdom and piety, or a lily
as a symbol of purity. Water in these pictures symbolizes purity and a strawberry refers to
26
Munch and van Gogh are also Expressionists and Gauguin a Synthetist, but the work of these artists has been
characterized in art historical accounts also as Symbolist, although more representative of Symbolism are such
artists as Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes. However, if we accept the characterization of
their own Symbolist work which Gustave Moreau and August Rodin gave, i.e. “a quest for the ‘inward feeling’”
(Pierre 1994,151), we can call just as well Munch, Gauguin and van Gogh Symbolists, for that is an apt
description of their painting.
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justice. Symbolism connected to religion appears in later art as well, but conventional
symbols are by no means only related to religion. The seventeenth century favoured heavy
symbolism, e.g. in the vanitas still lifes. Their purpose was to represent the transitoriness of
life with concrete imagery of extinguished candles, skulls, torn sheets of writing paper,
broken columns and urns, dark colours and many other symbols referring to death. Besides
conventional symbols in portraits, such as books, sheets of paper and pens referring to the
learnedness of the model, also personal symbols were represented. (Ibid. 27) Also within
Symbolist art, especially in paintings with theosophical and religious tones, conventional
symbols have been used, but among Symbolists, too, there has been free, personal use of
symbols, which in fact was the original idea in French Symbolist poetry. In his painting
Apparition Gustave Moreau brings together symbols of castration, guilt, the soul resisting the
temptations of the flesh and the spirit surviving the annihilation of the body (Pierre 1994,
151). In Odilon Redon’s paintings there are symbols of a dream world unconnected with
allegory, and Eugène Carrière’s smoke screens symbolize the fog of emotions (ibid.).
In Virginia Woolf’s novels symbols are multidimensional, ambiguous and personal
like the symbols in modernist poetry and painting. An example of such an ambiguous symbol
in Woolf’s fiction is the lighthouse. It may be interpreted in several ways, also
conventionally. In church art the symbol of a lighthouse tower is frequently used in the
significance of the tower guiding with its light the “ship of life” in the right direction
(Biedermann, 1993, 374). Each interpreter of Woolf’s works projects his/her own interests
and aspirations on them. Pamela J. Transue sees the lighthouse as a symbol of the merging of
the masculine and the feminine, the phallus and the eye (1986, 91). Although Woolf herself
claims that she meant nothing by the lighthouse (see Bell 1972, 106), the reader easily
interprets it as a symbol. Perhaps it is because Woolf has managed to create a poetic
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atmosphere of mystery around the tower that each reader wants to interpret it as a symbol of
whatever he/she associates it with. N. C. Thakur (1965, 79) has interpreted the lighthouse in
Woolf’s novel as a symbol of the eternal and the immutable. On the other hand, Norman
Friedman (1975, 349) writes that the lighthouse beam “symbolizes quite clearly that the
problem of subject and object and the perception of the nature of reality is a matter of
opposites held in dialectic relation.”Hermione Lee (1977, 132) has yet another interpretation
of the meaning of the lighthouse, even though a somewhat hesitant one: “To some extent this
light is identified with Mrs Ramsay’s creation of harmony and rhythm, and she herself
appropriates it, as Clarissa does the bells of London, finding it expressive of certain qualities
in herself and of certain moments in her experience [… ].”Lee gives the lighthouse another
significance identifying it as a concrete tower with Mr Ramsay. The duality of meaning is
supported by the following passage of the novel:
The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened
suddenly and softly in the evening. Now
James looked at the Lighthouse. He could
see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was
barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing
spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?
No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other
was the Lighthouse too. (TL, 211)
Friedman (ibid. 341) warns us against too much simplification in the interpretation of
Woolf’s images and symbols, since the ambivalent internal states depicted in the novels are
expressed through images whose symbolism is also many-sided and ambiguous. Among the
many-faceted symbolic structures of the novel, Friedman has detected also universal
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symbols and archetypal patterns,27 for example in water imagery. The term “lighthouse,”as
Avrom Fleishman suggests (1977), has a symbolic dimension when it is understood as
referring not only “to the stark tower on a bare rock,”but also to the house of the family,
which shining in the darkness is a place of plenitude and vitality, when Mrs Ramsay is still in
the house. But when the family leaves the house in the “Time Passes”chapter it is no longer
a “lighthouse”: “The lighthouse is left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a
sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it”(TL 156). The water imagery
functions for Lily both as a destroyer and a preserver (ibid. 353). In general, as Friedman
(ibid. 347) notes, the imagery of the book may be characterized by this aspect of duality. For
example, most of the time the lighthouse beam symbolizes for Mrs Ramsay peace, rest and
the triumph over life, but when her mood changes the light turns pitiless and remorseless.
Thus the lighthouse beam may be interpreted in many different ways according to how you
read it and what things you associate with it. It could symbolize inspiration, stability, security
and love, but just as well quite opposite things such as hardness and the cruelty of life.
Similarly, the symbols in The Waves can be interpreted in many different ways. N. C.
Thakur (1965, 105) reads the waves and the sea as symbols of life and reality:
Just as ripples rise out of the sea, grow into separate waves, rise higher and bigger, then
break and subside into the sea becoming part of it again, in the same manner human
beings take birth as different individuals, like Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny,
27
Joseph L. Blotner has done a mythical reading of To the Lighthouse. Blotner interprets the novel by means of
two myths: the Homeric Primordial Goddess the Kore and the Oedipus myth (see John B. Vickery, ed. Myth and
Literature: Contemporary Theory and Practice, 1966). Also Maria Dibattista has read To the Lighthouse
through the Oedipus myth and by means of Christian mythology in her essay “To the Lighthouse: Virginia
Woolf’s Winter’s Tale”(see Ralph Freedman, ed. Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, 1980).
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and Rhoda, and passing through infancy, youth, and old age, ultimately rest in reality,
and there, achieving ‘fusion with eternal spiritual principal’, continue to exist.
Thakur also traces archetypal symbolism in the novel. There is unresolved ambiguity in the
treatment of the waves, as Hermione Lee (1977, 168) points out and at the same time asks
whether the waves are meant to suggest human lives or whether they are impersonal forces of
fatality. The waves could be understood as symbolizing the individual consciousnesses, as
Thakur notes in his analysis of the novel (ibid. 116).
In my reading, they could symbolize the thought processes in human mind that proceed
without cessation, or simply represent the forces of nature. On the other hand, according to
Hans Biedermann, traditionally in many myths of creation water has stood for a source of life
and a place of birth, but it has also been understood as a destructive element annihilating life.
From the point of view of psychology, water is a symbol of deep unconscious layers of
personality. Thus also the traditional meanings of water are dualistic: it is the source of life,
yet on the other hand it refers to death and annihilation. (Biedermann 1993, 406-7) These
conventional meanings provide convincing readings of the ‘waves’symbol in Woolf’s novel,
particularly “the symbol of deep unconscious layers of personality” could be a plausible
explanation of this image. “The waters of annihilation,”an expression Woolf used in To the
Lighthouse (p. 205), is in accordance with the traditional meanings of water referring to both
life and death. As Norman Friedman notes (1975, 354-5), “the waters of annihilation”is a
key phrase which has a symbolic function and is associated with the water imagery in
Woolf’s works. The phrase “waters of annihilation”recurs in Woolf’s story “On Being Ill,”
and according to Friedman (ibid.) it may be connected to the thought of rebirth in both of
Woolf’s texts. In these texts water has ambivalent meanings, which are the conventional
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meanings of water described by Biedermann above: the source of life, or rebirth, as Friedman
puts it, and death and annihilation.
Even though Virginia Woolf’s fiction may be seen containing mythical and archetypal
imagery, her production is not predominantly based on myths. In this respect her prose
differs considerably from a typical Symbolist painting which often illustrates ancient myths
or figures and has fantastic elements. Modernist literature, also Virginia Woolf’s, is firmly
rooted on modern reality without imaginative beings, such as angels or gods, nor fantastic
elements or stories (except to some extent in Orlando). In Woolf’s novels story and plot are
secondary to description of impressions, feelings and thoughts of the subjective mind. Many
symbolist paintings may be understood as allegories, which are symbols based on convention
or reason, but there are also Symbolist works of art in which the symbols are ambivalent and
ambiguous. According to José Pierre (1994, 1916) an example of such ambiguous
symbolism is Gustave Moreau’s paintings depicting modern or historical female figures, e.g.
Delilah, Helen of Troy, Leda, and Salome. These paintings symbolize at the same time the
figure itself, something unconscious or hidden, and female mysticism (ibid. 16-17).
Although Symbolist paintings are often related to myths or religious themes, they may
also have modern subjects and be associated with personal experiences and sentiments.
Symbolism represented by Edward Munch’s Expressionist works or Paul Gauguin’s
Synthetist paintings is in its expressive means closer to the modernist expression of Woolf’s
stream-of-consciousness novels. In Munch’s and Gauguin’s art symbolic relations and
emotions may be expressed by means of colour and line, while Woolf evokes symbolism
through form and structure.
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In Edward Munch’s painting The Cry (1893) 28 colours are used to suggest inner
feelings, the strong anguish or horror experienced by the crying figure in the painting. The
sky is filled with agony in the red and yellow which are used as a sharp contrast to the somber
colours of the rest of the picture. Similarly, Vincent van Gogh understood the suggestive
power of colours when he explained that to express the love of two lovers, one should use
“the marriage of complementary colours, their combinations and contrasts, the mysterious
vibrations of colours coming together” (Huyghe 1977, 163). Van Gogh explains: “For a
thought behind a brow, use rays of a light color against a somber background; for ardor of
being, a beam of the sunset; and use red or green in painting terrible human passions”(ibid.).
According to a contemporary critic of van Gogh (see Shiff 1984, 7), van Gogh himself
regarded his material means of colour and line as expressive, not imitated, and as techniques
of symbolization. According to Shiff (ibid.) this was the essence of Symbolism in painting:
“to direct pictorial means toward the expression of ‘Ideas’rather than the observation of
objects.” Yellow was an important colour to van Gogh, which is not surprising when we
think of his lovely yellow sunflowers, full of the glow of life and sunshine. To van Gogh love
was everything and painting was to him an act of love. He was devoted to obliterating the
individual before the divine and he was trying to project outward the light that emanated
from him. Vincent van Gogh had a religious feeling in his use of colours, and he was said to
have been passionately fond of yellow, the colour of divine clarity. Also when he painted
portraits he tried to find radiance in his models and translate it by suitable colour schemes.
(Huyghe, 162-163.) This kind of thinking has a lot in common with Symbolist ideas, i.e.
28
Edward Munch’s The Cry is regarded as an icon of existential anguish. His work often included the symbolic
portrayal of such themes as misery, sickness, and death.
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religious undertones or colour symbolism, even though van Gogh is usually categorized as an
Expressionist painter.
Colour, however, may be interpreted in many different ways. If yellow signified
divinity to van Gogh, the spectator may understand quite differently his yellow sunflowers or
yellow wheat fields. Rather than divine light and radiance, I would for instance interprete the
yellow colour as the beauty of nature and enjoy the colours purely as colours. Conventionally,
on the other hand, yellow is understood as related to gold and thus symbolizing sunshine,
divine light and eternity, just as van Gogh experiences this colour. Yet yellow may be
attributed with negative connotations as well: it has been believed to symbolize anger and
jealousy for instance, the colour of bile (Matikainen and Sarmas 2004, 39). In modernism the
subjectivity of symbolism is central, whether it is in the self-expression of the artist/writer or
in the eyes of the beholder who interprets the work of art through his/her own experiences
and world view. The symbolism in the works of van Gogh, Munch or Virginia Woolf may be
thought to be unconventional and ambiguous and thus it may be analyzed in various ways.
Paul Gauguin also used colours to express emotions in his Synthetist and
Symbolist-oriented paintings. The expression of his paintings was simpler and more reduced,
less romantic, i.e. more modernist, in their language than that of the more “romantic”
Symbolists, such as Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon or Puvis de Chavannes. In his later
paintings Gauguin was inspired by the primitive art and the Tahitian nature and people.
Gauguin, like Woolf in her fiction, used modernist means to express symbolic content. For
example in his painting The Vision after the Sermon, known also by the name Jacob’s
Struggle with the Angel (Lutte de Jacob avec l’ange, 1888), he has painted on the canvas both
the vision and the people who are watching this vision. The people gathered as a large group
in front are watching and praying simultaneously and their superstitious fears are projected
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before their eyes as a “performance”where Jacob is struggling with the angel. The vision is
painted with imaginative bright colours to show the intensity of feelings experienced by the
people after the sermon. Especially the red colour of the ground emphasizes the unreal,
fantastic nature of the vision. The devices used in the paintings such as the absence of
perspective, the exaggerated size of the figures in front, the fusion of two worlds in the same
picture
reality and fantasy
belong to the modernist language of art. But the painting has
also symbolical relations and many inexplicable elements.
As Richard Shiff points out (1984, 6), “the simplified rendering of volumes, the broad
outlining, and the flat, unmodeled passages of brilliant color”signified for the contemporary
critics “the motivating force of an ‘Idea,’or mystical vision.”This painting meant no longer
the observation of external reality, but revealed through “a purified language of visual forms,
the world of symbolic correspondences”(ibid.). Gauguin was interested in expressing his
own feelings and personality in his paintings: he painted many self-portraits in which his
moods and different mental states were represented by different pictorial devices. Likewise,
Virginia Woolf was writing her own life in her fiction and some of her novels have
autobiographical elements, e.g. Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse. As Galaya Diment
(1987, 77) writes, the autobiographical nature of To the Lighthouse is very well established.
“To the Lighthouse is going to be fairly short, to have father’s character done complete in it;
and mother’s; and St Ives; and childhood [… ],”Woolf wrote in her diary in 1925 (cited in
Diment 1987, 77). Many critics and also Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell have seen Mrs Ramsay
as a portrait of their mother. In a letter to Virginia, Vanessa describes her amazement at the
likeness of her portrayal of Mrs Ramsay with their mother (Bell 1972, 128). Pamela J.
Transue is among the critics (1986, 61) who argue that Jacob’s Room was created as a
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reaction to Woolf’s brother’s Thoby’s death, since there are so many resemblances between
Jacob’s and Thoby’s lives, for example their studies in Cambridge and their early death.
The same way as Symbolist and Expressionist painting, Woolf is saying things through
suggestion, not by actually stating what she wants to say. “Reality lies behind phenomena,
not in them, and the essence of human beings can only be captured by what they don’t say,”
as Irma Rantavaara (1954, 152) points out and continues to explain the symbolism of The
Waves as follows:
Nowhere in her novels does Virginia Woolf so painfully feel the inadequacy of words
as a medium of conveying the symbolic content of a familiar experience. Although
The Waves illustrates the common experience, it is not linked to every-day life by the
same use of seeming trivialities as in the earlier novels. It takes a further step in a
contrary direction, towards the depths of the mind, into the borderline of the irrational
and the subconscious, into a region where the accepted common language is not
enough
of which Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake offer the best examples. Virginia
Woolf, too, feels the need of “some little language such as lovers use, broken words,
inarticulate words like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.”The adjectives she uses
tumble suggestively on top of each other: “a painful, guttural, visceral, also soaring,
lark-like, pealing song”bores itself into the reader’s mind, although the author herself
finds words inadequate and is dissatisfied with “these flagging, foolish transcripts,
how much too liberate, how much too reasonable!”“Music, and the silent kingdom of
paint,”would offer much better adaptable ways of expression than words. She tries
without discarding the normal language
to come as near to both in her language as
possible, especially in The Waves, where the rhythm and the word-painting form an
essential part of its attraction. (Ibid. 154-155)
As the above citation suggests, Woolf attempts to convey meaning through musical and
painterly means as much as language allows a writer to experiment. Here we come to the area
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of synaesthesia, which was an interest shared also by Symbolism. The reference above to the
irrational and the subconscious is an aspect in Woolf’s fiction that has also a relationship to
Surrealism, the movement that had an interest in the subconscious and the dream. Woolf,
however, does not depict dreams, but she describes the mind of a mentally ill person, and
here she comes close to the Surrealists’interests, for they, too, were interested in madness.
Septimus’s hallucinations of red flowers growing through his flesh, or a dog becoming a man,
resemble Surrealist paintings or poems. André Breton’s interest was directed towards aspects
of madness which were associated with imagination such as hallucinations and illusions, and
he considered them important sources of enjoyment. Breton defends “the mad”who in his
opinion are most of all victims of their imagination (Breton 1988, 15).
Salvador Dali’s interest in paranoia produced paintings with burning giraffes, flowing
bent watches and female figures with protruding open drawers. Surrealist painters used this
kind of symbolism in their depiction of dreams, the subconscious or fantasies, 29 but the
interpretation of the symbols is not apparent, for the spectator cannot “know”the private
world depicted in the paintings. The symbols and figures in them remain ambiguous. Dali
created his method which he called “critical paranoia”on the basis of Surrealist theory of
automatism. According to Dali’s theory the artist should cultivate genuine delusion as in
clinical paranoia but at the back of his mind remain aware that the control of the reason has
been deliberately suspended. Dali’s method rests on the assumption that the delusions of a
paranoid person are based on reality. (Kaitaro 2001, 97) The paranoid visions of Septimus
Warren Smith are also based on reality. For example, the red flowers that grow through his
29
Dali used Freudian motifs and concentrated on sexual imagery (see Fer 1993, Realism, Rationalism,
Surrealism. Art Between the Wars, New York, New Haven and London in Association with the Open
University: Yale University Press, p. 200).
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flesh have their origin in the red roses of his bedroom wallpaper. And, like the Surrealist
artist according to Dali, also Septimus has an awareness of reality when through the voice of
the narrator he is looking for an explanation for his paranoid visions:
Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benignant. It spared him, pardoned his
weakness. But what was the scientific explanation (for one must be scientific above all
things)? Why could he see through bodies, see into the future, when dogs will become
men? It was the heat wave presumably, operating upon a rain made sensitive by eons
of evolution. (MD, 76)
The technique of automatism of the Surrealists may be read as analogous to the
stream-of-consciousness technique used by Woolf. In both techniques the artist produces
associations in trying to imitate the subconscious processes of the mind. According to André
Breton (1988, 36), pure psychique automatism is the Surrealist method by which a person
expresses verbally, through writing or some other manner, the real functioning of thinking.
The Surrealists’ intentions, however, were different from Woolf’s: they aimed at the
strangeness of images and the confrontation of distant realities (Kaitaro 2001, 47-8). Woolf’s
novels, with the exception of Orlando and the mad thoughts of Septimus in Mrs Dalloway,
are realistic in their depiction of the world, while the Surrealists based their art on fantasy.
Some critics have argued that colours in Woolf’s novels have been used allegorically to
symbolize some important issues of the text. Lena Sundin’s dissertation Iconicity in Writing
Process: Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” and Gerald Murnane’s “Inland” (2004)
interprets colours as expressions of iconicity in To the Lighthouse, recalling the role of
colours in Byzantine sacred art as distinguishers of important persons and events. In Sundin’s
study colours denote for example absence, death, fruitfulness, etc. In her theory, the purple
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colour in Lily Briscoe’s painting, which stands for Mrs Ramsay, “signifies the most elevated
stage in a process of emancipation or redemption”(Sundin 2004, 51). This purple triangle
then, according to Sundin “indicates the presence of a process of transformation similar to the
spiritual transformation occurring in the Christian soul that was originally modelled on the
alchemical process of purpling, iosis, whose highest stage was the purple colour” (ibid.).
Thereafter Sundin compares the models of Lily’s painting, Mrs Ramsay and her son James to
an archetypic, iconic Madonna and Child. In my reading, this kind of allegoric interpretation
of colours is not convincing, since Woolf herself never expressed any interest in religious
themes nor did she intend her works to have straigthtforward symbolic meanings, for
instance she claims that she did not mean anything by the lighthouse (cf. Bell 1972, 106).
Sundin is convincing, however, when she connects Mrs Ramsay and James to classical
paintings of Madonna and the Child. The references in the novel to art and painting are
numerous, as has been pointed out by Monroe C. Beardsley (1981, 406-7) when he notes that
“there are at least half-dozen works of art that are important to the story: Carmichael’s poetry,
Lily Briscoe’s painting, the Boeuf en Daube, Rose’s centerpiece, Mr Paunceforte’s style, and
Mrs Ramsay herself.”And as Beardsley suggests, the recurrent images of art make art itself
become symbolic in the novel.
In another recent study colours in The Waves and To the Lighthouse are interpreted
symbolically. In her allegorical reading of Woolf’s colours and aesthetics The Feminist
Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and The Politics of the Visual
(1998) Jane Goldman argues that in Virginia Woolf’s novels aesthetic concerns such as
colour and light were inseparable from political and feminist concerns. According to her
interpretation, in The Waves and To the Lighthouse colours have feminist connotations (e.g.
she talks about suffragette colours in Woolf’s texts) and she associates them more with
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aspects of Post-Impressionism than Impressionism. Colours, Goldman suggests, are symbols
of hidden feminist messages, which seems to me an implausible theory, for why would
Woolf have wanted to hide her political and feminist messages and opinions in a “code
language” in her elegiac novels such as To the Lighthouse and The Waves when she
discussed these questions openly in her essays (A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas) and to
some extent in the themes of her novels. I think that it is possible, however, to look for
Post-Impressionist ideas and principles in certain aspects of Woolf’s novels, just as possible
as to find parallels for them in Impressionism, but it is not a very convincing argument to
claim that Woolf would have used certain colour words to convey feminist symbolism.
Despite Goldman’s preference of Post-Impressionist interpretations, she, however, admits
that for instance in the interludes of The Waves “the colours’subordination to light is perhaps
impressionistic, whereas the use of colour to express shadow suggests a Post-Impressionistic
abandonment of chiaroscuro [… ]”(Goldman 1998, 189).
According to N. C. Thakur (1965, 54), Jacob’s Room is the first novel in which
Virginia Woolf has, like the Post-Impressionist painters, used colour symbolically. He
compares “the pale yellow light, and something yellow-tinted and sulphureous”to the dark
and lemon yellow colours of van Gogh’s The Night Café. These colours of Woolf would then
suggest Phlegethon, the river of fire in Hades, and thus become symbols of dread and fear. In
Thakur’s study, however, everything seems to be interpreted in terms of symbolism, but his
interpretations are just one way of reading Woolf’s novels. Minow-Pinkney (1987, 84) thinks
that Jacob’s Room is not as successful in its pursuit of symbolism as To the Lighthouse.
According to her (ibid.), the latter novel illustrates modernism’s general tendency of
metaphoric (symbolist and mythopoeic) representation of experience.
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The reading of symbols in Wool’s modernist novels and the Symbolist and Surrealist
painting should not be allegoric or one-dimensional. As the above analysis of different,
sometimes antithetical, symbolic meanings suggests, the symbolism in modernist art and
literature is ambiguous and many-faceted, allowing room for different interpretations.
7. Correspondences of the Arts
Symbolists were interested in correspondences between the arts. The idea came from Charles
Baudelaire and his sonnet “Correspondances” (1857) in which he presents two kinds of
correspondences: those between the material world and spiritual realities, and those between
the different human sense modalities, i.e. synaesthesia (Preminger 1979, 837):
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.
Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies. (Baudelaire 1973, 19)
Synaesthesia refers to “the perception, or description of the perception, of one sense modality
in terms of another”(ibid. 839). Virginia Woolf’s language is poetical and rhythmical and
her prose has visual elements as well, as Irma Rantavaara suggests (cf. the previous chapter).
Woolf’s fiction does not contain just synaesthetic elements, or correspondences between the
arts, but correspondences between different literary genres as well — autobiography, poetry,
drama and prose — which was a typical feature of the modernist novel as well.
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In synaesthesia different sense experiences are being fused, colours may have a sound,
a scent may have a colour, or a shape may have a sound. One of the most common forms of
synaesthesia is the hearing of colours. In this experience the person always combines a
certain note with a tone of colour according to its pitch. Another common form of
synaesthesia is letter synaesthesia, in which every number or letter is sensed to have a certain
colour. (Sarmas 2004, 70) A well-known example of the latter is Arthur Rimbaud’s poem
“Voyelles”where Rimbaud composes a poem based on the synaesthesia of different vowels
expressing colours:
VOYELLES
A NOIR, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu : voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes :
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,
Golfes d’ombre ; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d’obelles ;
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes ;
U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
Paix des pâtis semés d’animaux, paix des rides
Que l’alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux ;
O, suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges,
Silences traversés des Mondes et des Anges :
O l’Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux! (Rimbaud 1984, 91)
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In Rimbaud’s poem each vowel A, E, I, U, O of the French language corresponds to a
different colour, A is black, E is white, I is red, U is green and O is blue. This synaesthesia,
the mixing of two sensations perceived by two different senses, hearing and seeing, may of
course be just a play with ideas, a result of poetic imagination, although some people can
actually have experiences of fusing two senses. In the visual arts, too, it is possible to use
synaesthetic effects or the spectator may have synaesthetic experiences in the reception of the
work of art. For example, the spectator may experience colours and forms of a painting as
sound. In Munch’s painting The Cry the expressiveness of the lines and brightness of the red
and yellow are so strong that we can actually imagine that we hear the cry that comes out of
the figure’s wide open mouth. Synaesthetic experience is not strictly speaking exactly the
same thing as the correspondences of the arts, which does not necessarily refer to the fusion
of sense experiences. Symbolist critics draw parallels between the arts, for instance Redon’s
paintings were compared with the poetry of Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe with the music
of Claude Debussy (Chilvers and Osborne 1988, 484). On the other hand, synaesthesia is also
a rhetorical figure used in literature to denote the combination of words that refer to different
senses.
In literature synaesthesia must be understood metaphorically, since language cannot be
thought in terms of the senses. Language is not similar to sound unless literature is read aloud.
But if literature is read silently, as usually is the case, we cannot identify the language of
literature with the senses. Through words literary texts may evoke images before our eyes, a
writer may for example “paint pictures”by means of a description. But not all description in
literature is related to the visual, for also sounds, smells, feelings, ideas, events and characters
may be described by the narrator. Mostly the visual in a novel concerns the description of
visual perceptions whose objects may be a landscape, nature, people’s appearances and
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clothes, buildings, furniture, and animals. Some novels, on the other hand, are composed
mainly of dialogue.
In the novels which I have explored the use of synaesthetic figures is not conspicuous
although Woolf’s prose is poetic (after a brief survey I did not come across any).
Nevertheless, in her books many analogies can be drawn between the visual arts and
literature. Sue Roe (2000, 167) suggests that Virginia Woolf incorporated a synaesthesia into
her writing style by which Roe does not, however, refer to the use of rhetorical figures. Many
other critics have noticed the visuality of Virginia Woolf’s texts. Woolf’s works have been
compared to Cézanne, Manet, Monet, Picasso, some critics see her as an Expressionist, some
as an Impressionist (Rantavaara 1953, 123). Virginia Woolf also uses many ideas and
techniques that are familiar in the visual arts, in painting, photography and film. Sue Roe’s
article “The Impact of Post-Impressionism” (2000) explores the influence of
Post-Impressionist painting on Virginia Woolf’s artistic development. Roger Fry, a painter
and member of the Bloomsbury circle, was the person who introduced the Post-Impressionist
ideas to Virginia Woolf. She, for example, read Fry’s essays on aesthetics in the collection
Vision and Design and found there many ideas that she applied in her later work (1920) (cf.
Roe 2000, 168). In the essays Fry wrote on the Post-Impressionist principles, among which
were the idea that art should not only imitate life, but to find equivalents for it, that one chief
aspect of order in a work of art is unity, and that vision and design are bound together (Fry
1961, 34, 190).
According to Fry some kind of unity is necessary for the contemplation of the work of
art as a whole. This unity in a picture is achieved through a balancing of the attractions of the
eye about the central line of the picture. (Fry 1961, 34) Virginia Woolf expressed her interest
in this idea of the central line in her conversations with Fry, and according to her own words,
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applied the idea to her design of To the Lighthouse (see Bell 1972, 129). A novelty in modern
art was the importance of subjectivism, a feature which is clearly present also in Woolf’s art.
In art subjectivism meant that form itself had psychological connotations, and Roger Fry
argued that the graphic arts are above all the expression of imaginative life, not the mere
copying of actual life. (ibid. 22-26) The various methods by which an artist arouses the
spectator’s emotions Fry called “the emotional elements of design.”These elements are the
rhythm of the line, mass, space, light and shade, and colour. According to Fry, nearly all
these emotional elements of design are connected with our physical existence. (Ibid. 36-37)
Rhythm, which is an important aspect of Woolf’s writing, may be understood as an
emotional element in her prose. Fry proposes that rhythm arouses the spectator’s emotions
and has physical and bodily connections. Also the notions of perspective, which the
Post-Impressionist painters were working on and which I have discussed in chapter 5 in
connection with simultaneity, affected Woolf profoundly, as Roe points out (1990, 17). Fry,
however, does not discuss the perspectival questions in “An Essay in Aesthetics.”
As Sue Roe (ibid. 168) points out, in Post-Impressionism subjectivity found its
expression paradoxically in surface. This paradox also Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse is
trying to solve while she is painting Mrs Ramsay’s portrait. Lily has to work out how the
vision she wishes to communicate in her painting through lines and colours will be expressed
in the right way, how to express her subjective vision by means of composition and colours.
In fact, To the Lighthouse as a whole is a metaphor of artistic creation with all the elements
that are needed in it, including death and pain and the passing of time. The painting of a
picture has obvious analogies to a writer’s work, which becomes clear at the end of the novel
when Lily has accomplished her vision at the same time as Woolf has accomplished her
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novel. Woolf describes in many instances of the novel the difficulties in the creative process
of the artist, the differences between planning the work and its realization:
She looked blankly at the canvas, with its uncompromising white stare; from the
canvas to the garden. There was something (she stood screwing up her little Chinese
eyes in her small puckered face) something she remembered in the relations of those
lines cutting across, slicing down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of
blues and browns, which had stayed in her mind; which had tied a knot in her mind so
that at odds and ends of time, involuntarily, as she brushed her hair, she found herself
painting that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying the knot in imagination. But
there was all the difference in the world between this planning airily away from the
canvas, and actually taking her brush and making the first mark. (TL, 178)
In the novel visualization is the description of visual perceptions or impressions by the
narrator or the characters.30 In writing it is possible to use the same ideas as in painting, for
example, the ideas and innovations of Post-Impressionism, such as simultanism, multiple
perspective, flatness, etc. However, I think that the use of modernist ideas does not
necessarily make the novels “look like”Post-impressionist paintings. The fragmentation of
form in a work of Picasso, e.g. a multiplicity of dimensions in a single face, for example, is
not the same thing in visual terms as the fragmented narration in Woolf’s fiction. On the
other hand, it is possible to think that the descriptive passages, which may be understood as
depictions of the character’s or narrator’s visual perceptions, are closer to synaesthesia in
literature than the use of the modernist ideas of painting such as fragmentation or perspetival
30
According to Mieke Bal (1997b, 4), “Literature, after all, works within the medium of language. If we take
into account this self-evident fact, then each visual image is first of all a verbal image and refers only indirectly,
at the level of its meaning, to the visual images of other categories.”
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issues, because descriptions are easier to translate into “visual images”in the mind than for
instance fragmented forms.
In Woolf’s novels the narrator, often representing the characters’ thoughts and
observations, depicts visual perceptions by means of colours, lights, shadows and their
effects on nature (cf. above Fry’s emotional elements), or by describing the things and
furniture in a room, but in Woolf’s novels these visualizations are only quick flashes,
momentary impressions, which change into some other thoughts or associations, as usually
happens in consciousness. In To the Lighthouse Woolf explains “[… ] how life, from being
made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole
like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the
beach”(TL, 55). The following passage in To the Lighthouse exemplifies how quickly colour
effects and other visualizations shift into other things, for example events and actions, and
then the mind returns to colour impressions again:
‘It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat,’she said, looking about
her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep green, the house starred in its
greenery with purple passion flowers, and rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue.
But something moved, flashed, turned a silver wing in the air. It was September after
all, the middle of September, and past six in the evening. So off they strolled down the
garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas by red-hot pokers
like braziers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the bay looked
bluer than ever. (TL, 23-4)
To the Lighthouse, however, is not the best example of a “visual novel” in Woolf’s
production, although it describes Lily Briscoe’s Post-Impressionist paintings and their
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compositional and colour principles. It is rather a psychological novel, interested in the
characters and the working processes of an artist.
Mieke Bal discusses Woolf’s descriptive passages in The Waves and connects them
with narrative sections in novels, which are called pauses by the terminology of structural
narratology. A pause is a narrative section in which no movement of the fabula time (cf.
footnote on p. 85) is implied. Many novels by Virginia Woolf alternate the presentation of
slow unimportant events with lengthy descriptive passages, and it is often hard to notice the
difference between the presentation of events and the descriptions of objects, so that the story
proceeds like a long descriptive flow (Bal 1997b, 53). The descriptive interludes in The
Waves could be seen as descriptions of the visual observations of somebody who has seen
these scenes of nature (they are presented by an omniscient narrator), but they resemble also
Impressionist paintings (see my analysis in ch. 3). The narrator, describes his/her
observations of lights and shadows, colours and forms in nature like a landscape painter
expresses them with his/her brush. The following passage exemplifies well typical features
of literary description, i.e. detailed narration, the gradual presentation of the depicted
“object”and the creation of real life effects (Mikkonen 2005, 234):
The sun rose higher. Blue waves, green waves swept a quick fan over the beach,
circling the spike of sea-holly and leaving shallow pools of light here and there on the
sand. A faint black rim was left behind them. The rocks which had been misty and soft
hardened and were marked with red clefts.
Sharp stripes of shadow lay on the grass, and the dew dancing on the tip of the
flowers and leaves made the garden like a mosaic of single sparks not yet formed into
one whole. The birds, whose breasts were specked canary and rose, now sang a strain
or two together, wildly, like skaters rollicking arm-in-arm, and were suddenly silent,
breaking asunder.
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The sun laid broader blades upon the house. The light touched something green in
the window corner and made it a lump of emerald, a cave of pure green like stoneless
fruit. It sharpened the edges of chairs and tables and stitched white table-cloths with
fine gold wires. As the light increased a bud here and there split asunder and shook out
flowers, green veined and quivering, and pealing a faint carillon as they beat their frail
clappers against their white walls. Everything became softly amorphous, as if the
china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid. Meanwhile the
concussion of the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds, like logs falling, on the
shore. (W, 19-20)
This interlude contains many aspects to which an artist pays attention when he/she is painting
a landscape; the artist has to observe different colours, shadows and shades in nature, or how
the light affects the scene, which are all essential elements in Impressionist paintings.
However, in this passage also subjective, interpretative elements are present, for example in
the following comparisons: “The birds, whose breasts were specked canary and rose, now
sang a strain or two together, wildly, like skaters rollicking arm-in-arm, [… ]”and “a cave of
pure green like stoneless fruit”and “the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds, like logs
falling.”These comparisons accentuate the presence of the subjective mind, the narrator in
the observational act, which could be compared with what the Post-Impressionists or
Expressionists did in their paintings by painterly means in order to achieve their subjective
vision (cf. Fry’s principle of subjectivity).
The interest in the visual arts is emphasized in small details of Woolf’s fiction as well.
Besides the central metaphor, Lily’s painting, in To the Lighthouse, paintings and other
related issues are mentioned in several places of the novels. In To the Lighthouse (p. 83)
William Bankes mentions the names of Rembrandt, Michaelangelo and Titian when he is
telling Lily about the paintings he has seen in the museums of Rome and Madrid. In another
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scene of the novel Mrs Ramsay is knitting her stocking in front of a copy of a painting by
Michaelangelo hanging on the wall with her head outlined by the gilt frame (see TL, 36). The
intertextual allusion to Michaelangelo’s painting links Mrs Ramsay to Michaelangelo’s
Madonnas. This kind of intertextual allusion to visual arts is one example of the use of
ekphrasis in literature. Ekphrasis does not have to be only depictive (see Mitchell’s and
Heffernan’s definition of ekphrasis below); it can also be attributive or associative,
according to the definition of ekphrasis by Valerie Robillard (Hollsten 2003, 122).
According to Hollsten, intertextual allusions may include artist’s name, style, and genre, and
the title of a work of art. The allusions to painters in To the Lighthouse are examples of
attributive ekphrasis.
Jacob’s Room is constructed to a large extent on descriptions of perceptions; it is built
on the juxtaposition of small tableaux. Robert Kiely (1983, 147) compares Jacob’s Room to a
still life: “the easel is ready, the room has been prepared, but the model’s chair is empty.
Instead of fleshed-out portrait, what we find more nearly resembles a still life, a
painstakingly careful arrangement of objects within a frame.”The still life, nature morte, is a
striking metaphor to describe the novel, since Jacob himself is absent in the novel. Like the
painted objects in a still life, in Jacob’s Room things are often depicted by the narrator, for
example, the things and furniture in Jacob’s room where Jacob is never present. Perhaps
Woolf intentionally planned this absence of the protagonist, since Jacob is a portrait of her
dead brother Toby Stephen, at least according to various interpretations of the novel. If
Jacob/Thoby is dead, he does not occupy his room any more; instead what is left is the empty
room with the things in it: nature morte. As Kiely (1983, 154) points out, “Woolf’s
descriptions of Jacob’s rooms are the major set pieces of the novel and the ones that best
illustrate the artistry of confinement and release.” As description can be considered a
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counterpart to visualization in literature, the comparison of Jacob’s Room to a still life is very
apt:
Jacob’s Room had a round table and two low chairs. There were yellow flags in a
jar on the mantelpiece; a photograph of his mother; cards from societies with little
raised crescents, coats of arms, and initials; notes and pipes; on the table lay paper
ruled with red margin
an essay, no doubt [… ] (JR, 36)
In this extract the narrator enumerates things, which is a typical feature of description in
literature (see Mikkonen 2005, 232). The depiction of Jacob’s room has elements of a type of
description which Mieke Bal (1997b, 42) calls the referential, encyclopedic description. The
main objective of this type of description is to convey knowledge.
In Jacob’s Room colour words are used frequently, which is another reference to
visualization in narration. The narrator describes a painting as follows: “As for pictures
a
maiden in a large hat offered roses over the garden gate to a gentleman in eighteenth-century
costume” (JR 100).This verbal description of the painting is an example of ekphrasis
according to the definition given by A. W. Heffernan and W. J. T. Mitchell of ekphrasis as a
verbal representation of visual representation (Hollsten 2003, 120). The visual representation
in ekphrasis can be ornaments, such as Achilles’shield in the Iliad, or an urn in John Keats’
poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” sculptures, photographs or paintings (ibid.). Ekphrasis
involves both the translation of a visual work of art into words and the translation back into
an image in the reader’s mind (Mikkonen 2005, 263). This example of ekphrasis does not
give a detailed description of the painting, a description which would inspire the reader to
“see”the painting in front of his/her eyes (see ibid. 262). In a successful ekphrasis the writer
pretends to see the object so clearly that he/she makes the reader see it as well. An author who
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masters ekphrasis has a skill to describe and interpret what he/she sees in such a way that
he/she captures the reader’s attention. (Ibid.) Woolf, on the other hand, leaves her readers a
possibility to use their imagination in the visualization of the paintings.
There is a reference to synaesthesia in the book as well: “Sometimes one thing,
sometimes another, to confirm her philosophy that colour is sound
or perhaps it has
something to do with music”(JR, 102). This reference proves that Woolf was aware of the
Symbolists’interests in synaesthesia. Woolf describes also the other side of the painter’s
work: the work of the female model who sits to the painter Nick Branham. But in the same
context she describes the painter’s work, the difficulty of capturing the beauty of a woman in
a picture:
As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never constant to a single
wave. They all have it; they all lose it. Now she is dull and thick as bacon; now
transparent as a hanging glass. The fixed faces are the dull ones. Here comes Lady
Venice displayed like a monument for admiration, but carved in alabaster, to be set on
the mantelpiece and never dusted. A dapper brunette complete from head to foot
serves only as an illustration to lie upon the drawing-room table. The women in the
streets have the faces of playing cards; the outlines accurately filled in with pink and
yellow, and the line drawn tightly round them. Then, at the top-floor window, leaning
out, looking down, you see beauty itself; or in the corner of an omnibus; or squatted in
a ditch
beauty glowing, suddenly expressive, withdrawn the moment after. No one
can count on it or seize it or have wrapped in paper. Nothing is to be won from the
shops, and Heaven knows it would be better to sit at home than haunt the plate-glass
windows in the hope of lifting the shining green, the glowing ruby, out of them alive.
Sea glass in a saucer loses its lustre no sooner than silks do. Thus if you talk of a
beautiful woman you mean only something flying fast which for a second uses the
eyes, lips, or cheeks of Fanny Elmer, for example, to glow through. (JR, 111-112)
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This passage could be a description by an Impressionist painter telling about his difficulties
in seizing the right moment and the fleeting beauty that never stays still. It could also be a
description of a photographer trying to find the decisive moment in order to capture the
beauty of the model. Parallels could be drawn also to the work of a stream-of-consciousness
writer: Woolf could in this passage just as well have described her own creative process in
writing her novels. The passage may be characterized as a metaphoric metonymy following
the classification by Mieke Bal (1997, 262). In metaphoric metonymy contiguity is the
dominating principle of construction. Another feature is that metaphors are made of each
individual component, and the text is of a very metaphoric nature. In general, Woolf’s texts
can be characterized by a high degree of metaphoricity in the descriptive passages.
In Jacob’s Room there is another painter at the beginning of the novel who is painting a
landscape picture. Woolf describes again the creative process of the artist this time paying
attention to the choosing of colours from the point of view of composition and expression:
He struck the canvas, a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was too
pale
greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just so
too pale as usual. (JR, 6)
In Jacob’s Room Woolf herself is very much involved in choosing the right colours, for she is
depicting different objects and views by means of a frequent use of colour words, which
could be called word painting. However, the difference between a painting and word painting
is that the colours and other effects are not stable in literature. The picture in a novel is in
constant movement and little alterations are taking place as you read the text:
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The Scilly Isles were turning bluish; and suddenly blue, purple, and green flushed the
sea; left it grey; struck a stripe which vanished; but when Jacob had got his shirt over
his head the whole floor of the waves was blue and white, rippling and crisp, though
now and again a broad purple mark appeared, like a bruise; or there floated an entire
emerald tinged with yellow. (JR, 45)
The visualization of a landscape in Jacob’s Room takes place by means of a series of
juxtaposed images, which, merging into one another, compose a series of pictures as in a film.
In Jacob’s Room many painters are mentioned: Titian, van Gogh, the Italian painters of the
Renaissance, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. These painters, however, have no
particular relevance in the novel, except perhaps by showing the learnedness and cultural
interests of the protagonist, whose room is decorated by some of these painters’works and
who possesses books on the painters.
In The Waves Virginia Woolf is looking for analogies and differences between the two
art forms, painting and writing. Bernard, who is a writer, is in the Italian room at the National
Gallery looking at the paintings, especially at a blue Madonna painting by Titian, and
comparing the freedom of a painter to the servitude of a poet: “I doubt that Titian ever felt
this rat gnaw. Painters live lives of methodical absorption, adding stroke to stroke.”(W, 105).
Bernard thinks that painting is somehow easier to control than making phrases: “Lines and
colours almost persuade me that I too can be heroic, I, who make phrases so easily, am so
soon seduced, love what comes next, and cannot clench my fist, but vacillate weakly making
phrases according to my circumstances” (ibid.). In Bernard’s opinion painters are not
chained to the rock like poets, and therefore are able to achieve silence and sublimity in their
work. Woolf does not describe in detail the paintings Bernard is watching at the National
Gallery (she only mentions them by name or subject matter), but the paintings serve as an
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inspiration of aesthetic and philosophical speculation to Bernard. As Kai Mikkonen suggests
(2005, 233), pictorial references affect and work up the semantic structures of a novel. Thus
we could see the Madonna paintings in the National Gallery as an inspiration to both writers,
Bernard and Virginia Woolf, and in a sense understand them as guiding and forwarding also
Woolf’s narration.
Charles Baudelaire, not only making analogies between colours, sounds and
perfumes in his poem “Correspondances,” is also looking for parallels between paintings
and poems. In his poem “Les Phares” Baudelaire presents the idea that the great artists
illuminate mankind (1973, 19), a theme which had already inspired the romantic poets, who
considered both artists and poets to be magicians and guides. But Baudelaire adds to this
idea the thought that the role of a poet is to express by means of words what a painter
expresses with colours, the same thought that Bernard utters in The Waves. The poem is
inspired by the following great painters whose names begin each new stanza: Rubens,
Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Puget, Watteau and Delacroix. Also Virginia
Woolf is making parallels between different artists in her novels. In several of her novels she
depicts the work and creative problems of different artists: in To the Lighthouse there is a
painter, Lily Briscoe, in Orlando and The Waves there is a poet, and in Between the Acts
there is a playwright, Miss La Trobe. These artists represent different art forms but they
share the sameness of the artistic creative process, even though they have their basic
differences as well.
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8. Ambiguity in Images
Metaphor is of particular interest in a research which draws parallels between verbal and
visual art, since the notion of metaphor contains visual aspects. Metaphor is not only a verbal
concept, but may be used also in the analysis of visual images. I apply here Mieke Bal’s
definition of metaphor as a verbal image of a mental image.31 Metaphor is characteristically
ambiguous, as William Empson has shown in his work Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), and
this ambiguity is an important common denominator in the metaphoric readings of art and
literature. According to Empson (1949, 5-6,) “‘Ambiguity’itself can mean an indecision as
to what you mean, an intention to mean several things, a probability that one or other or both
of two things has been meant, and the fact that a statement has several meanings.”From this
definition by Empson we may infer that ambiguity has something to do with multiple
meanings, indecision and uncertainty. If a metaphor inherently has all these connotations, we
may think that it is also a notion referring to a greater freedom of interpretation, in other
words, the work of art with metaphoric meanings is not “simply just one thing,”but many
things at the same time and different things to different interpreters. As I have mentioned
earlier, modernist art is characteristically metaphoric — especially modernist novel and
Symbolist, Surrealist and Expressionist art — and due to its ambiguous character the role of
the interpreter is accentuated in the reading process. The creative aspect of metaphor is
important in Coleridge’s revolutionnary notion of the mind. Coleridge saw it as an “active,
self-forming, self-realizing system,” which imposed itself on the world, and creatively
31
Mieke Bal (1977a, 4) explains that it is possible to think of metaphors as verbal images of mental images and
descriptions as verbal images of perceptual images.
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adapted and shaped it. Thus imagination acts as the chief instrument in this process. (Hawkes
1972, 43)
Metaphor and symbol are very close in meaning and it is not easy to explain their
differences. Both concepts refer to a substitution of some idea or image by another. The
concepts of allegory, metaphor and symbol are all related, and allegory and metaphor used to
have the same significance as symbol has had later in everyday language (Kallio 1991, 714).
Therefore, if we want to differentiate metaphor and symbol as analytical tools32, I suggest
that metaphor could be used to refer to more unconventional ideas and images in a work of
art, both in literature and visual art. Metaphor could be restricted to highly personal, creative
use in art and literature, which has a special connotation of subjectivity. In other words,
metaphor would be free of all kinds of conventional uses and artistic conventions and
function as a sign of individuality. Ambiguity, in the words of E. H. Gombrich (1989, 264),
“cannot be seen
it can only be inferred by trying different readings that fit the same
configuration.”In Gombrich’s thinking (ibid.) similes and metaphors “testify to the powers
of the creative mind to create and dissolve new classifications.”Gombrich mentions Georges
Bracque as an example of a modern artist who spoke of “the ease with which a file can
become a shoehorn, a bucket a brazier”(ibid.). This example of Bracque brings out the aspect
of human creativity, which is especially conspicuous in the metaphoricity and ambiguity of
modernist art.
32
According to Wellek & Warren (1966, 186) the terms image, metaphor, symbol and myth overlap
semantically. It has been suggested by Middleton Murray that the term ‘image’would be used to include both
‘simile’and ‘metaphor’as terms of rhetoric, and that the image is not only visual but it may be auditory as well.
Like ‘image’‘symbol’appears in widely different contexts and different purposes. It appears as a term in logic,
in mathematics, in semantics and semiotics and epistemology, theology, the fine arts and of poetry. The shared
element in all these current uses is probably that of something standing for, representing, something else. (Ibid.
186-211)
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In the following analysis I apply I. A. Richards’analytical terms of metaphor 33, tenor
and vehicle, which are meant to designate the two parts of metaphor. Woolf’s novels can be
understood as mental images, as metaphors, where two unrelated images are juxtaposed. For
example, the novel To the Lighthouse as a whole is a metaphor.34 This metaphor consists of
two parts, the first part (vehicle) of the metaphor is an image of the lighthouse as a building in
the sea throwing light to those at sea, the second part of the metaphor (tenor) consists of the
cycle of nature, the alternation of days and nights, which is to be read in the structure of the
novel, the middle section representing night and the first and last sections standing for day.
You may then project different readings to this metaphor. The tenor part of the metaphor, that
of the natural cycle which is read in the novel’s structure, has often been interpreted as
referring to the lighthouse beams, two long strokes of light and between them the shorter
period of darkness. If this reading is accepted, we can establish an unexpected resemblance
between these two unrelated ideas, which ordinarily do not have any resemblance, but which
in this poetic context get this special connotation.
In To the Lighthouse, in the local texture of the writing there is a great density of
metaphor and simile. As Minow-Pinkney (1987, 85) points out, metaphor is also a thematic
concern of the book. She interprets the polarity of Mr and Mrs Ramsay as an opposition
between literal meaning and metaphoricity when Woolf contrasts the rigorous propositional
discourse of the philosopher with the symbolic language of art.
33
I.A. Richards developed the analysis of metaphor in his work The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) (see Hawkes
1972, 43).
34
Also Marcel Proust’s A la rechereche du temps perdu in its entirety has been compared to a cathedral. The
work has been seen as a collection of stained-glass windows and thus can be considered as having a visual form,
a spatial form as opposed to temporal and sequential. (Bal 1997a, 3-4)
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It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so
many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his
splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly
and accurately, until it had reached, say, letter Q. (TL, 39-40)
According to the interpretation of James Naremore (1973, 128) metaphors in To the
Lighthouse serve a special function: to keep the reader at a distance from the characters’
consciousness. The metaphoric approach to Mr Ramsay’s cognitions, i.e. the alphabet
metaphor read by Naremore as the author’s comment on Ramsay’s thought, keeps the author
at a distance, and at the same time implies a blend of irony and affection (ibid.).
The identification of Mrs Ramsay and the light of the lighthouse is a metaphor with
antithetical meanings: “With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one’s
relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so
much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call [… ]”(TL, 75).
‘The window’may be conceived as a metaphor in To the Lighthouse: the window
refers to seeing, to vision and to visual art. Mrs Ramsay has a habit of sitting by the window
contemplating, “having visions,”looking through the window and making observations of
life. When she is looking through the window she symbolically “sees another world”into
which she escapes. The title of the first part of the book is “The Window”and thus this title
further enhances the centrality of the window image in the book. On the other side of the
window Lily Briscoe is painting Mrs Ramsay who poses as the model of her painting. Here
the window image refers to Lily who is looking and seeing Mrs Ramsay from an artist’s
perspective, her vision as an artist. The window image is also associated to a painting as an
object since both window and painting are rectangular in shape and have frames.
Furthermore, the window metaphor is a connotation to Woolf’s own position as the writer of
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her novel who is writing the life story of her dead mother. Woolf is remembering and looking
at her mother from a closer perspective in the first chapter titled “The window.”In the final
chapter titled “The lighthouse”after her death she looks at her from a distance and as an artist
completes her vision simultaneously as Lily completes hers.
Jacob’s Room is the first of Woolf’s novels in which she introduces the image of the
moth (see Richter 1980, 13). In the novel the moth is a recurrent image, which is connected to
Jacob and his interest in butterfly collection. Woolf returned to the image of insects round a
lantern in an essay “Reading”written shortly after Jacob’s Room (see Fleishman 1977, 56).
Also in the essay “The Death of the Moth”Woolf explores the theme of the death of the moth,
and in Jacob’s Room Woolf associates the moth image with death. At the beginning of the
novel butterflies appear in the descriptions of Jacob’s childhood when the children are
catching butterflies (JR, 20-27). The images of butterflies may be read as having antithetical
meanings. The daytime butterflies such as blues, admirals, fox cubs, commas, yellows,
badgers, etc. may be associated with life, freedom, sunshine and play when they fly over the
moor or circle high around an oak tree. The daytime butterflies are metaphors whose tenor, or
subject, is the carefree child’s life of Jacob who is catching butterflies. But a moth which
Rebecca has cought has the antithetic connotation of death inherent in the idea of butterfly
(an animal with a short life-span): “Rebecca had cought the death’s head moth in the kitchen”.
(JR, 21) The moth is a dark butterfly which lives by the night. In the moth image death casts
its shadow over Jacob’s life which will be short as the life of a butterfly.
Harvena Richter (1980, 13), on the other hand, reads the moth as a symbol of the
questing creative mind. According to Richter, Woolf employed the moth image later in her
career in The Waves where it grew in importance. Richter suggests that in The Waves, which
climaxes her concern with this theme, the public and private meanings of the moth emblem
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are fused, and the writer and her work become one. In Richter’s reading the meaning of the
moth metaphor have connections to Woolf’s childhood, her illnesses and personal
relationships as well as her determination to understand her own creative process. (Ibid.)
In The Waves, as Eric Warner notes, Woolf’s prose has many features of lyric poetry:
“an arch, elevated style, an incantatory rhythm and, increasingly, a suffusion of simile and
metaphor”(1987, 39). At the micro level of the text Woolf often uses similes rather than
metaphors. Similes, which are akin to metaphors35, Woolf uses consistently for example in
the interludes of The Waves:
The birds, whose breasts were specked canary and rose, now sang a strain or two
together, wildly, like skaters rollicking arm-in-arm, and were suddenly silent, breaking
asunder. (W, 19):
The wind rose. The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned warriers, like turbaned
men with poisoned assgais who, whirling their arms on high, advance upon the feeding
flocks, the white sheep. (W, 51)
In the last example Woolf draws through personification a vivid picture of the waves, which
with the war imagery creates violent associations related to the remorselessness of nature. In
another interlude the waves are again described as something monstruous: “The waves fell;
withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.”(W, 101). The waves are
also described by means of a personification: “The waves massed themselves, curved their
backs and crashed.”From these examples we may infer that Woolf wants to fuse the animate
or human world with her idea of the waves. In Jacob’s Room and in all her other novels, as T.
35
According to Geoffrey N. Leech (1973), simile is an overt, and metaphor a covert comparison.
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E. Apter (1979, 37) notes, Woolf has two recurring images which mark two different aspects
of consciousness: “the eternal movement of life and death in waves crashing against the
rocks, and the marking of time by the sound of a bell.”In The Waves the interludes may be
read as metaphors also at the structural level of the novel. For example, Makiko
Minow-Pinkney (1987, 155) interprets them as images or dreams occurring inside the
narrative consciousness, for towards the end of the book Bernard returns to the opening
scene with the dawn sky and seascape described in the first interlude.
When we read the title of the novel The Waves metaphorically, we realize that the
novel does not give any one explanation to this metaphor, but in the mind of the reader it
remains an ambiguous image with multiple meanings. For example, it could refer to the “ebb
and flow”of the human mind, a reading which the stream-of-consciousness technique of the
novel supports. On the other hand, it could mean time and its eternal flowing, since Woolf
was very much preoccupied with questions concerning time in her novels. It could also refer
to the natural cycle, the alternation of day and night and different seasons, because the waves
have a regular beat and rhythm, like the seasons and the diurnal alternation. All the images
that Virginia Woolf recurringly borrows from the world of water, as Jean Guiguet (1965, 408)
explains, create a profound intimacy and harmony between her nature and water. Avrom
Fleishman (1977, 157) has found in the monologues of the characters identification with the
waves and concludes that the soliloquists themselves are waves in a deeper symbolic
meaning, not in the sense of a simile, i.e. “men’s lives pass and expire like waves on the
shore.”The soliloquists, as Fleishman continues to explain, “imagine themselves as waves,
think in wavelike rhythms, and model the scenarios for their lives on the sound and structure
of the waves”(ibid.) The dominant metaphor of the work indicated by its title is the waves; it
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is both an image of the waves, and a symbol or vision of the rhythmic nature of life and also
refers to the lives of the characters.
‘The waves’may be simply an image of the sea and the waves, which necessarily does
not have to have any further implications. On the other hand, the idea of the waves may be
thought as poetic or aesthetic device, something which enhances the novel’s visuality and
accentuates its impressionistic character. The reader is faced with indecision when he/she has
to decide which reading is the correct one. We may infer that ‘the waves’as a metaphor is
something which cannot be divided and analyzed,36 whereas ‘the waves’as a symbol is
something more precise and rational. The Romantics in accordance with the Platonic view of
metaphor emphasized the unity that lies underneath surface distinctions and ignores clear-cut
boundaries (Hawkes 1972, 44). The Romantic notion of the imagination stresses the
imaginative faculty’s connective power, and sets it against the divisive character of another
faculty: the reason, or discursive analysis (ibid. 36-37). Metaphor is nearer to a visual image,
and symbol rather suggests language, which is the tool of logical thinking and, therefore
could be thought to be more rational and analyzable than an image. Often metaphor and
symbol are used in art criticism more or less as synonyms. In this study, however, I want to
differentiate them, because I want to emphasize the ambiguous and visual elements inherent
in a metaphor.
Especially in Mrs Dalloway the images of time are frequent. The clocks or bells of
London are used as leitmotifs to suggest the impersonal passing of time, as the reminders of
mortality and the limited life-span. The sounds of the church bells or the public clocks
36
An image is also inherently continuous (see Lukkarinen, 1998, 102, and the introduction of the present
study).
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express human emotions for the characters who hear them and their feelings are fused with
the sounds:
And why had he been so profoundly happy when the clock was striking. Then as the
sound of St Margaret’s languished, he thought, she has been ill, and suffering. It was
her heart, he remembered; and the sudden loudness of the final stroke tolled for death
that surprised in the midst of life, Clarissa falling where she stood, in her drawing
room. No! No! he cried. She is not dead! I am not old, he cried, and marched up
Whitehall, as if there rolled down to him, vigorous, unending, his future. (MD, 56)
The ‘bells’and their sounds are personified images or sounds of the changing emotions in
Peter Walsh’s consciousness. When he is walking along the streets of London he feels
Clarissa’s presence in the sounds of St Margaret’s bells. In these metaphors it is rather the
hearing than the vision that is accentuated although we may visualize the bells and their
motions as well. Among the literary genres, personification is especially frequent in
folktales, fairy tales, children’s literature and to some extent also in love poems (Palmgren
1986, 120). The use of personification, which connects human characteristics to inanimate
things, may be seen as having its origin in primitive thinking and the myths, but also in
children’s way of seeing things. In the eighteenth century Giambattista Vico noticed the
“poetic”wisdom possessed by primitive people which evolved through metaphors, symbols
and myths towards abstract and analytical modes of thought. Vico saw an analogy in the
movement from childhood to maturity and in that from “primitive”societies to “civilized”
ones. The language of children is robust, vigorous and concrete compared with the abstract
distinctions and categories of adult “rational”speech. (Hawkes 1972, 38-39) The association
of primitivism of personifications suits well with the aspect of primitivism inherent in
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modernism. In the context of Woolf’s metaphorical language, where the personification has
its role in the depiction of the mind and the thought processes of the characters,
personifications may be seen as architypal or ”childish” elements in the text. Thus it is
possible to think that in personification as a typical feature of the unconscious architypal
levels of the human mind, as depicted in Woolf’s novels such as Mrs Dalloway and The
Waves, the fusion of human characteristics for example with clocks or the waves would
express the “unconscious child”which lies beneath people’s exteriour behaviour.
Also the Romantics such as Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge emphasized the
primitive origin of metaphor in “primitive”thinking and in the nature of human language
(see Hawkes 1972). To the Symbolists and the Surrealists, on the other hand, the example of
Romantic artists was important (see e.g. Atkins 1993, 186), and as we have seen in the
present study, Woolf, among other modernists, may be seen in the context of Symbolism.
Woolf’s use of metaphors and symbols in the depiction of the consciousness of her
characters is thus connected to the Romantics’notions of the importance of imagination and
metaphor in the human language and thinking and the primitive origin of metaphoricity. As
Pamela J. Transue (1986, 95) has proposed in her analysis of Mrs Dalloway, the image of
Big Ben with its “leaden circles”is an apt metaphor for the novel’s structure that may be
understood as circular and centered, which in Transue’s opinion represents for Woolf the
female consciousness. Yet, as Transue admits, the Big Ben imagery offers many other
implications as well, for elusiveness and symbolic openness is typical of Woolf’s fiction.
Although metaphor is originally a concept of verbal language, it is possible to interpret
images in terms of metaphors as well. Visual and verbal metaphors differ, however, first of
all in their expression. According to Iina Hellsten (1997, 78), in a visual metaphor the
expression may be solely visual or consist of a combination of the visual and verbal
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representations. A visual metaphor is based on the representation of an abstract idea by
means of a concrete form. In visual terms a chair does not exists in general as it does verbally,
but it is always a particular certain kind of chair. (Ibid.) Charles Forceville, who has studied
pictorial metaphors in advertising, classifies metaphors in the following way: 1) metaphors in
which only the other part
usually the source domain (another term for vehicle), sometimes
also the target domain (corresponds I. A. Richard’s tenor) is explicitly represented; 2)
metaphors in which both parts (source and target domain) are clearly represented (Forceville
1996, 109-133).
In painting, the other part of the metaphor is often missing in the picture; it exists only
in the imagination or interpretation of the spectator. For example, Vincent van Gogh’s
paintings may be understood metaphorically as representing the inner states and feelings of
the painter or the spectator, not only as pictures depicting reality, i.e. landscapes, buildings or
still lifes. Another example of a metaphoric reading of paintings is provided by Edward
Hopper’s paintings, e.g. House by the Railroad (1925), which may be interpreted as
representing loneliness and isolation, although the pictures themselves are very realistic
images of buildings and people. The metaphoric reading is inspired by the atmosphere of the
paintings, the simplicity of composition, barrenness of the scenes, choice of subjects, and the
depiction of night scenes. On the other hand, it is also possible to read Hopper’s pictures
simply as realistic scenes from American life.
As an example of modernist paintings which can be interpreted metaphorically I
analyze Marcel Duchamp’s Cubist self-portraits Jeune homme triste dans un train (The Sad
Young Man on a Train, 1911) and Nu descendant un escalier (Nude descending the Staircase,
1912). In Jeune homme triste the vehicle of the metaphor is the image of a series of motions
composed of lines, which acts as the representation of the tenor, or subject, to which reading
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also the title of the painting refers. According to the analogy principle of metaphor there
should be some kind of similarity between the two parts of the metaphor (the pictorial and the
verbal). In this case a connection is to be found in the idea of movement depicted in the
painting which is also inherent in the notion of ‘train’. In Nu the tenor/subject refers more
expicitly to movement represented in the painting than in Duchamp’s other painting. These
two paintings by Duchamp are example of visual metaphors which combine visual and
verbal elements. According to Irmeli Hautamäki (1995, 133), the title Nu is written on the
lower left corner of the painting, which was an exceptional and new practice in the history of
painting.
A more daring example of metaphor in modernist painting is another painting by
Duchamp, the readymade L. H. O. O. Q (1919), in which Duchamp explores the close
connection between irony and metaphor.37 In his work Duchamp uses a copy of Leonardo da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa painting where he has added a moustache into Mona Lisa’s face. In the
conventional analysis of metaphor the woman in the painting is the vehicle and the
moustache — a symbol of the male gender — is the tenor. In L. H. O. O. Q both parts of the
metaphor (tenor and vehicle) are in visual form. Normally in a metaphor it is the likeness of
vehicle and tenor that produces a metaphorical relationship. But in ironical metaphor it is
rather the contrast between tenor and vehicle, i.e. in the case of Duchamp’s painting
woman=man/masculinity, which produces irony in the painting. Leech (ibid. 174) points out
that metaphor and irony can arise from the same linguistic source, i.e. the violation of
co-occurrence conditions. This shows that irony and metaphor are both modes of
interpretation, in other words, they are not so much part of the text as part of the reader’s
37
See on ironical metaphor in Leech 1969, 173.
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response to the text. The possibility of multiple interpretations of Duchamp’s readymade
makes it ambiguous. The equation the quinessential femininity=macho masculinity in L. H.
O. O. Q may be interpreted as a representation of androgyny which interested Duchamp as a
theme also in some of his other works. It could also be read as a mockery of the bourgeois art
institution which idolizes certain works of art or certain artists, or sees art as an investment.
The title, which is nonsensical, further enhances the irony of Duchamp’s work. The story
connected to the origin of Duchamp’s L. H. O. O. Q reveals the playful nature of Duchamp’s
work that springs from the DADAist spirit of provocation, the tendency to conceive
modernist art as a game or a puzzle with multiple or contradictory meanings.38
Although Woolf’s work in general is more “serious”than Duchamp’s, occasionally she,
too, wrote ironic or playful texts, for example in her novel Orlando she plays with the idea of
Orlando changing sex. With her androgynous character Woolf creates a work of art that is as
ambiguous and ironic as Duchamp’s readymade of Mona Lisa. Duchamp’s interest in
androgyny is not, however, linked with feminist interests, while Woolf developed her
theories of androgyny in her feminist essay A Room of One’s Own. Woolf was intrigued by
Coleridge’s words about a great mind being androgynous (see Woolf 1994, 106). On the
basis of this idea of androgyny Woolf probably created her “man-womanly” or
“woman-manly”character Orlando. While Duchamp with his L. H. O. O. Q attacks the rigid
art institution and questions its values, Woolf criticizes in Orlando women’s position through
38
The story behind the painting related by Irmeli Hautamäki is the following. The Mona Lisa in Louvre was
sheltered by a bullitproof glass in order to protect it from thefts and saboteurs. This protective measure irritated
art lovers who claimed that glass separated them from the magical smile of Mona Lisa. A contemporary
caricaturist made a drawing in which a museum attendant with a moustache is admiring himself in the
bullitproof glass protecting Mona Lisa. Thus in the picture the man’s figure gets mixed with Mona Lisa’s lovely
face. Also Duchamp’s painting is covered by a glass. Duchamp’s message seems to be, as Hautamäki suggests,
that Mona Lisa’s smile is a trap into which the spectators have fallen often enough, and therefore they should
already be looking for new smiles. (Hautamäki 1995, 160-1)
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her androgynous figure who discloses the artificiality of gender roles and shows that both the
feminine and the masculine sex are in harmony in a fully developed mind.
In Surrealist paintings metaphoric readings may be applied to the fantasy world.
Whitney Chadwick (1985, 145) has discovered in Surrealist women painters’work nature as
metaphor for women’s reality. Men Surrealists mystified the relationship between woman
and nature and saw woman as the other, as something different from man. In Rita
Kernn-Larsen’s Les Deux Demoiselle’s (1949) two women-trees (femme-arbres) virtually
merge in the picture the idea of woman and nature, i.e. woman=nature, and André Masson’s
La Terre (1939) “depicts the sensuous contour of the earth itself, redolent with associations
of fertility and death”(ibid.). Chadwick argues that women artists were quick to appropriate
the identification between woman’s creative powers and those of nature, which was one of
the chief themes of male Surrealists (ibid. 142). The identification of the unconscious and
female nature in the women Surrealists’work makes the images of women and nature
metaphors of artistic creation (ibid.). In To the Lighthouse the character of Mrs Ramsay is a
metaphor in which fertility (nurturing mother of many children), her identification with
nature (her immersion into the sea and the lighthouse beam), her beauty and creativity (in
human relations) all come together.
Traditionally in men’s art women have been identified with nature and this
identification refers nearly exclusively to women’s reproductive role, but as Chadwick
argues in Surrealist women’s work nature may be associated with women’s artistic creativity.
Examples of other nature metaphors in women’s Surrealist painting are Nusch Eluard’s
Photo-collages (c. 1935), Rita Kernn-Larsen’s Apple (1934) and Frida Kahlo’s Two Nudes in
a Forest (1939). According to Chadwick (ibid.) Kahlo’s and Eluard’s pictures reveal a more
personal identification between woman’s reality and the forces of nature than in men’s
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paintings. Kahlo’s painting which depicts two nude women in a forest may also be read as an
ironic metaphor of the theme of Adam and Eve in paradise. The picture has clear allusions to
lesbian love that introduces irregularities and contradictions to conventional images of
heterosexual love in art. The ironic metaphors of Duchamp, Kernn-Larsen and Kahlo are
examples of what Geoffrey N. Leech (1969, 219) calls spatial puzzles: “Spatial ‘world’
denuded of conventional clues to interpretation,” whereby modern painters force the
observer into an awareness of his/her visual inferences.
E. H. Gombrich in his Art and Illusion (1960) shows how much of “reading a picture”
depends on imagining what is not in fact there (see Leech 1969, 218). A few dots and strokes
of paint, as Leech (ibid.) explains may suggest a distant crowd of people in a similar way as a
few linguistic clues may suggest a situation which we project into a poem. In interpreting a
poem, too, we apply the literary counterpart of what Gombrich calls “the consistency test”.39
The test means, as Leech (ibid. 218-219) explains, that we discard all the interpretatations
that do not fit in with the rest of “the world within the poem”, or as regards paintings,
meanings which are incompatible with “the world within the picture.” Modern art and
literature, as the examples of ambiguity and metaphoricity from Woolf and modernist art
show, has the special feature of creating contradictions and irregularities. Cubism, for
example, according to Gombrich (1989, 239-40), “succeeds in countering the transforming
effects of an illusionist reading [… ] by the introduction of contrary clues which will resist all
attempts to apply the test of consistency.”
Although Woolf occasionally uses irony in her texts the images in her novels are
predominantly lyrical. The images of nature, such as the waves and the butterflies, bring her
39
Gombrich defines the “consistency test”in the following way: “the possibility of classifying the whole of an
image within a possible category of experience”(Gombrich 1989, 200).
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closer to the Romantics, but her structural and narrative experimentation makes her a
modernist. As I suggested above, Woolf may be connected to the Romantics’notions of the
importance of imagination and metaphor in the human language and thinking, and to
Coleridge’s conception of the primitive origin of metaphor which shows in her architypal
imagery and the use of personifications. Through her nature metaphors she also establishes a
kinship with the Surrealist painters, especially with the women Surrealists. The consistency
and recurrence of Woolf’s images hightens their lyrical and ambiguous effects by bringing
different nuances into the texts and thus reenforce their interpretation as metaphors.
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PART FOUR
FEMININE MODERNISM
9. Virginia Woolf and Feminine Impressionism
Since the late nineteenth century Impressionism has been interpreted in art history and
criticism in terms of gender. At the turn of the twentieth century Impressionism was gendered
as female both by its conservative critics and its avant-garde competitors, but later in the
twentieth century art historians and critics regendered it as masculine when the masculinist
criticism wanted to emphasize the “scientific” aspect of Impressionism and the
Impressionists’interest in the colour theories of the epoch. Norma Broude (1991, 174) argues
that modernist tradition has aggressively gendered itself as male, which according to her is an
erroneous interpretation of modernism. I argue that Impressionism was a feminine art school,
“an art that was based on the subjectivity of vision and that emphasized the expression of
feeling and emotion generated by contact with nature”as Broude describes it (ibid.). I will
read Impressionism as a feminine art in order to make a more balanced interpretation of the
different schools or tendencies of modern art than it has been done in the masculinist art
criticism. My contention that there are several kinds of modernisms, both masculine and
feminine, is a strategic choice to question the widely spread conception of modernism as a
masculine art. The notion of “the feminine,” as Janet Wolff (2003, 87) points out, “has a
history as the basis for the confirmation of the distinct, innate, and inferior characteristics of
women and their work.” My analysis of “the feminine” is a reversal of these negative
conceptions of femininity. I want to argue that the femininity of Impressionism and the work
of women Impressionists is a neutral or a positive characteristic.
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In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf discusses women as writers, and asks whether
literature written by women is different from that written by men. According to her, many
male writers’books “celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of
men”(Woolf 1994, 110). As a female reader Woolf finds the books of John Galsworthy and
Rudyard Kipling lacking all feminine characteristics and “all their qualities seem to a woman
[… ] crude and immature”(ibid.). Woolf believes that a fully developed mind “does not think
specially or separately of sex”(ibid. 107), but it is androgynous (ibid. 106), woman-manly or
man-womanly (ibid. 112). Although Woolf is against sex-consciousness in writing a novel
and believes that it produces one-sided or bad literature, she admits that women’s literature is
clearly different from that produced by men: “It would be a thousand pities if women wrote
like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, [..]”(ibid. 95). In fact, Woolf encourages
women to write books that suit best their lives and their circumstances:
The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that
women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed
so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions
there will always be. (Woolf 1994, 85)
Women’s literature, and painting, have been different because women’s lives have been
different. For instance, Jane Austen’s and other nineteenth-century novelists’texts, as Woolf
explains (ibid. 77) were shaped by the influences they received while sitting in the common
sitting-room where they learned the observation of character and the analysis of emotion.
Some schools of modernism appealed to women more than others because they were
closer to women’s interests, psychological inclinations or biological predispositions, or
simply women’s social reality. Impressionism opened possibilities for women to become
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artists, because the subjects were no longer restricted to nationally or historically important
subjects nor portraits of patrons and because Impressionism liberated art from academic
painting. This is one reason to regard Impressionism as the beginning of modernism. It was
the first “modern” movement that liberated women from the undemocratic system of art
education which favoured men and higher social classes. The subjects of Impressionist art
which were from everyday life — either outdoor views or portraits of ordinary people —
appealed to bourgeois women who lived their everyday life in the private sphere. In the
paintings of female Impressionists Berthe Morisot and May Cassatt we meet frequently
subjects of bourgeois women’s daily lives. Griselda Pollock has made a survey of the spaces
represented in their paintings. Pollock (1988, 56) lists the following spaces: dining-rooms,
drawing-rooms, bedrooms, balconies/verandas, and private gardens. As Pollock notes, the
majority of these spaces are private areas or domestic spaces. According to her (ibid.), the
engagement with the Impressionist group was attractive to some women because subjects of
domestic social life hitherto classified as mere genre painting were accepted as central topics
of painting. Thus Impressionism both made painting possible for women and was concerned
(to some extent) with their social reality. Morisot’s and Cassatt’s paintings depict exclusively
their own gender and children, and also male Impressionists depict women (which were often
courtesans and prostitutes), so that also in this respect Impressionism could be called a
feminine art. Impressionism may thus be seen as a “document”of women’s lives.
Virginia Woolf could also be called a representative of feminine modernism. She
depicts the lives of middle-class women and men, but mostly her protagonists are women. In
To the Lighthouse she juxtaposes the feminine and the masculine principle in the characters
of Mr and Mrs Ramsay and in my reading she opts for the feminine principle. Mr Ramsay is
a stereotype of the masculine rational way of thinking, representing scientific, objective, hard,
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selfish and unemotional attitude towards life, and Mrs Ramsay is the quintessential feminine
woman, tender, loving and understanding. She is identified in the novel with creativity: she is
an “artist in life”and a source of inspiration to others. In the character of Mrs Ramsay the
aspects of emotion, subjectivity of vision, identification with nature, and humanism may be
compared with the characteristics of Impressionism mentioned above by Norma Broude. It is
not hard to notice that the characteristics of Impressionism and those of Mrs Ramsay are
almost identical. Likewise, the features of masculine modernism, such as objectivity and
neutral or unemotional scientific attitude, are close to the character of Mr Ramsay. Thus on
the thematic level Woolf’s novel may be said to represent the “values”of Impressionism
when understood as a feminine art in the feminist reading.
Mrs Ramsay’s identification with nature does not signify that, due to her motherhood,
she somehow would resemble nature or be part of it any more than men are part of it, as the
masculinist discourse proposes, but it rather means that she is closer to nature because it
comforts her, gives her inspiration and functions as a source of creativity, as I have
mentioned in chapter 8 in connection with Surrealist feminist painters. Usually to read
women as nature is an attempt to bereave of them intellect, which according to masculinist
discourse is reserved only for men. According to Norma Broude, in the Western
philosophical tradition the gendering of nature as female may be found already in the
writings of Plato (the Timaeus) and Aristotle (On the Generation of Animals). Aristotle
divided the cosmos into the heavens, conceived as immutable and perfect and gendered as
male, and the earth that was subject to generation and decay was gendered as female. (Broude
1991, 145) In my reading of To the Lighthouse or Impressionism, to talk about the contact
with nature does not mean that women are less intellectual or intelligent than men, nor that
their only function in society is motherhood. Such a reading of the novel is contradicted for
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instance by the personage of Lily Briscoe who represents intellectual or artistic womanhood,
although her artistic talent is being questioned constantly by men in the novel, especially by
Charles Tansley who keeps whispering the words “women can’t paint, women can’t write”to
Lily so often that she starts believing them herself.
Mrs Ramsay represents the Victorian stereotype of femininity, the Angel in the
House,40 which Woolf describes in her essay “Professions for Women.”The Angel in the
House is an unselfish, sympathetic woman who sacrifices herself daily. In the essay Woolf
comes to the conclusion that “killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a
woman writer”(Woolf 1979, 57-63). Woolf relates how she herself was forced to struggle
with this phantom. In To the Lighthouse she liberates women from Victorian womanhood by
presenting an independent woman who is searching for her identity as an artist. According to
Barbara Hill Rigney (1984, 239), Woolf has two types of heroines: those who are painters,
writers, or musicians, creators of art, and those who create of themselves “objects of vision.”
This latter category of characters who lose their subjectivity and identity as they assume the
traditionally male-defined role of art-object include Clarissa Dalloway who enjoys to be the
centre of her party as she enters the party room, aware of the exitement her entrance causes,
Mrs Ramsay who sits “framed”in a window as an object of admiration to passing spectators,
and Jinny in The Waves who “enters a candle-lit room, seats herself in a gilt chair and
arranges her dress so that it billows around her”(ibid.). Woolf, I would suggest, juxtaposes
two possible role models for a woman: the old model of housewife, mother and object of
admiration, and the new model of working woman and artist, a role which at the time Woolf
40
“Angel in the House”derived from Coventry Patmore’s best-selling nineteenth-century poem (Bowlby 1995,
78).
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wrote her novels was still rare. Woolf does not clearly state which of the roles is better for a
woman, but rather shows the reader the difficulties and advantages in both roles.
In her identification with nature the character of Mrs Ramsay have clear affinities with
Romanticism, as Pamela Transue (1986, 88) suggests. According to Transue, Mrs Ramsay’s
physical presence loses its distinctness and blends with nature in a manner similar to that
often described in Romantic poetry. The image of the waves is also used in Woolf’s fiction as
a means to merge nature and human beings. In many other respects as well Woolf’s novels
resemble Romantic literature or painting. The novels are much involved with what Broude
(1991, 149) calls the socially constructed feminine attributes of emotion, intuition and
empathy that characterized the Romantic period. Besides the mystical identification with
nature Woolf’s fiction may be seen to give expression to the Romantic ideal of androgyny. In
A Room of One’s Own Woolf discussed Coleridge’s conception of an androgynous mind
(Woolf 1994, 106). The Romantic notion of the androgyne perpetuated the traditional
distinction between the rational male and the sensible female, which as Broude (ibid.) points
out, offers a refinement of patriarchal domination rather than a dismantling of it. Woolf
curiously presents these stereotypical conceptions of femininity and masculinity in the
characters of Mr and Mrs Ramsay. Woolf does not overtly criticize the stereotypical roles of
the self-sacrificing mother figure or the rational male figure, but lets the reader make his/her
own interpretations. As I explained above, she believed that a good writer should not be too
sex-conscious. It is possible to think that In to the Lighthouse Woolf consciously presents
both the masculine and the feminine part of the brain and thus creates her androgynous vision
of life following the Coleridgean idea of a great mind being androgynous, “man-womanly”
or “woman-manly.” Since Mrs Ramsay is largely a portrait of Woolf’s own mother, as
Transue points out (1986, 82), we may find in Lily’s role a key to Woolf’s feminism. Lily’s
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rebellion and (artistic) independence is possible only after Mrs Ramsay’s death. Lily’s
liberation is symbolized in the successful completion of her painting, and Woolf’s own
liberation in the successful distancing of her mother’s influence when after her death she was
able to commit herself to her fiction and free herself from her mother’s memory (ibid.).
Broude (1991, 151) suggests that especially Romantic and Impressionist landscape
painting have been regarded as feminine. The landscapes of Monet, Boudin, Sisley and
Pisarro were characterized as “feminine”by an American critic in 1886. This interpretation,
according to Broude, is probably suggested by the tranquility of rural and suburban settings,
domestic iconography, and their lack of interest in socially problematic subjects (ibid.). Such
texts as The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway in which Woolf attempts to catch
the ephemeral nature of life and human consciousness resemble in their fleeting
capriciousness the Impressionist painting. Woolf’s “impressionism,”even though it is linked
to the subjectivity and emotional nature of Romanticism, Symbolism and Impressionism, is,
however, a product of her own time and the Bergsonian influence which emphasized the
importance of individual intuition. As William Troy (1970, 86-87) convincingly argues,
Virginia Woolf was naturally attracted by a writing method that had its origins in psychology
and metaphysics and which offered much to the speculative mind, especially when Woolf
possessed a mind alert to the intellectual novelties of her own time.
Besides the subject matter, i.e. women’s reality, Impressionism may be described
feminine in its aesthetic. According to Delia Gaze (1997, 997), Berthe Morisot’s work was
thought “to stand for the purest and most essential embodiment of the Impressionist
aesthetic”in the 1890s and in subsequent French accounts. For the French criticism Morisot
represented the quintessential “feminine”painter who fulfilled the demands for the delicate,
feminine sensibility that was thought to represent well the conception of Impressionism as a
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“spontaneous,” “superficial” art of “sensation” (ibid.). 41 No doubt all these “feminine”
characteristics which were used to describe Impressionism were understood by the critics as
pejorative terms. In my analysis, they are not considered negative qualities but words
describing an art that strived to question and rebel against the formal and rigid academic
painting and the styles of Realism and Neoclassicism. Morisot’s painting In the Dining Room
(1886), which depicts a young housewife in the dining room, is painted in a spontaneous,
sketchy manner, which represents a somewhat less rigorous style of painting than is to be
seen in the works of the leading male Impressionsists Degas, Monet, Renoir, Pisarro or
Manet. According to Denis Thomas (1975, 54-55) Morisot’s work shows the influence of
Manet, but it is generally softer and looser in execution and lighther in palette. Thomas uses
the expressions “womanliness” to describe the dominant characteristic of Morisot’s work
(ibid. 55). Also Cassatt’s work Thomas characterizes by the attribute “feminine charm”(ibid.
77). The greater freedom in execution visible in Morisot’s work may be read as a sign of
protest against the rigorous “objectivity” of earlier Realist or Neoclassical painting. In
Morisot’s painting Woman at her Toilet (1875, ill. 1) there is a sense of motion resembling
cinematic effects and making it “femininely”lively and modern.
The perception of the feminized character of the Impressionist landscape painting
concerned most of all the techniques that the artists employed, not so much the subjects, and
these techniques were objected by critics in clearly gendered terms (Broude 1991, 151).
Berthe Morisot’s paintings were praised for the quickness and fluidity of her brushwork, but
these features were regarded by the same critics as negative qualities in the work of her male
41
In nineteenth-century France women were widely thought to be physiologically less capable of rational
thought and prone to emotionalism and superficiality. It was also believed that woman’s “natural”bent toward
humility and obedience was biologically determined and this explained her lack of originality. (Broude 1991,
152.)
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colleagues (ibid.). One French writer of the period who claimed that “the masculine esthetic
is an esthetic of form”and “the feminine esthetic is an esthetic of movement”has made a
point that suits well my feminist reading of Impressionism as a feminine art (see ibid. 151).
Feminine aesthetic may indeed be seen as an aesthetic of movement, an aesthetic of
liberation from the rigid rules of composition, perspective and meticulous brushwork, rules
which insist on scientific “objectivity” and illusionism, instead of the subjectivity and
expressiveness which are so characteristic of Impressionist and subsequent modern art. Thus
the words that in the nineteenth-century and later French criticism have been used as
pejorative expressions to undermine women artists and Impressionism can be turned round
and used as positive features of the first movement of female modernism.
The Impressionist Mary Cassatt painted chiefly portraits of women and children in
their daily occupatitions. Women are also shown at work: taking care of children (The Bath,
1892), doing handwork (Lydia at a Tapestry Frame, c. 1881 and Lydia Crocheting in the
Garden, 1880). As Griselda Pollock (1988, 63) points out, intimacy and closeness are
characteristic of Cassatt’s paintings. This effect is achieved by means of a photographic
close-up technique which enables the viewer to have a very intimate relationship with the
depicted figures. According to Pollock (ibid.), a common device used by Cassatt is a shallow
pictorial space which the painted figure dominates. The use of close-up and the slice-of-life
point of views refers to Cassatt’s familiarity with photographic techniques and practices, but
also to her interests in depicting women and children from a close perspective in their daily
activities. In other words, Cassatt wanted to illustrate women’s daily reality, while her male
Impressionist colleagues depicted either beautiful landscapes (Monet, Pisarro, Sisley) or
women who were the objects of their desire or admiration: prostitutes (Manet) and dancers
(Degas). As Pollock points out (ibid.), in the depiction of children Cassatt has chosen a low
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viewpoint from which the room is depicted, for instance in Young Girl in a Blue Armchair
(1878) which makes it easy for the viewer to identify with the “perspective”of the child.
In The Little Sisters (1885, ill. 2) Cassatt again uses her close-up technique but this time
from an adult’s point of view, as the little girls have been painted from a higher perspective
so that the girls are looking up at the painter. The painter succeeds in capturing the same kind
of spontaneity and contingency as a photographer, or Virginia Woolf in the “close ups”of her
characters for instance in the traffic of London in Mrs Dalloway. Cassatt’s sketchy
brushwork, which is an unusual technique in the majority of her paintings, underlines the
ephemeral and vivid impression of her painting. Also Berthe Morisot uses consistently the
slice-of-life perspective in her paintings, but in her work the human figure, which is
regularily female, is not always so important for the composition as in Mary Cassatt’s
pictures. Morisot often paints her figures as seen from a distance (View of Paris from the
Trocadero, 1872) or places her figures near the edge of the painting (The Harbour at Lorient,
1869) thus giving more importance to landscapes or other views.
Morisot’s and Cassatt’s work concentrates on the depiction of bourgeois women’s
lives in their homes and sometimes also in public places such as parks and the opera. Woolf
depicts also the upper middle-class women who do not usually work outside their homes,
although some of her minor female characters try to make their living outside the domestic
sphere as well. One of these minor figures is Miss Kilman in Mrs Dalloway who, unlike the
regular Woolfian figures, has to make her living by giving private lessons to rich people’s
children. Also Lily Briscoe is trying to make a career as a painter but she either does not earn
her living with her work. Woolf shows in these two novels how difficult it is for a woman to
earn her living or make a career as an artist because of the hostile or prejudiced attitudes of
the environment towards women’s work.
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Like Virginia Woolf, Mary Cassatt was an activist of women’s rights. Mary Cassatt’s
feminism shows in her subjects: the realistic depiction of women’s everyday life, the
household work and child-caring duties. More poignantly the feminist interest is manifested
in the painting project of one of the central murals for the Woman’s Building of the
Columbian Exposition of 1893 which Cassatt was asked to paint. The theme of the paintings
was “women’s rise from slavery and ignorance in primitive times to their current state of
education and accomplishment in modern times”(Gaze 1997, 369-371). Cassatt’s mural was
called Modern Woman (1893), and it portrayed women picking fruit from the Tree of
Knowledge. On the sides were scenes showing young girls pursuing fame and women and
the arts. (Ibid.) After the Women’s Building was later pulled down, Cassatt’s mural was lost,
but some photographs were taken and crudely coloured prints made of her work (Nichols
2005, 1). According to art historian Nancy Matthews, when having interpreted the published
reproductions of the murals and Cassatt’s own words, the mural’s meaning becomes clear,
especially against the background of late-nineteenth-century women’s issues. The central
panel, Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science, is probably connected to
women’s recently acquired access to college education. Matthews sees Cassatt’s depiction of
women passing the fruits of knowledge from one generation to the next as a direct assault on
traditional religious interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis.
(Ibid. 4-5)
Janet Wolff argues (2003, 92) that modernism and modernity are gendered male. Most
theorists of the modern have discussed mainly the public sphere of work, politics and city life.
The key figures of modernity
the flâneur, the dandy, the stranger
were male (ibid.). The
public sphere was in the nineteenth century and still in the first decades of the twentieth
cenntury predominantly a masculine domain, and as the experience of modernity occurred
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mainly in the public sphere, it was primarily the area of men’s experience (Wolff 1990, 34).
The depiction of city life was essential in modernism and in the experience of “the modern.”
Charles Baudelaire writes in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life”about a modern figure
who dwells in the city. He describes this type of modern artist as a man of the world, a man of
the crowd42 and a child, as a type whose central characteristic is curiosity. The modern artist,
who he calls the flâneur, is free to stroll along the streets, to be in the crowd, to see the world
without being watched. He is an indefatigable observer who enjoys heimself immensely in
the crowd, in the surge and movement of the city. The flâneur has the freedom of the voyeur
who is at the centre of the world and yet remains unseeen from the world. (Baudelaire 2001,
182-190) Walter Benjamin wrote about the Baudelairean flâneur “who goes botanizing on
the asphalt”as follows:
The street becomes a dwelling place for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the
façades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enammelled signs
of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in
his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands
are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down
on his household after his work is done. That life in all its variety and enexhaustible
wealth of variations can thrive only among the grey cobblestones and against the grey
background of despotism was the political secret on which the physiologies were based.
(Benjamin 1973, 36)
In the modernist art and literature the themes that interested men, such as primitivism
and masculine sexuality in the paintings by Picasso and Gauguin or in the novels of D. H.
42
With “man of the crowd” Baudelaire refers to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story Man of the Crowd (see
Baudelaire 2001, note 12, p. 293 by Antti Nylén).
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Lawrence and James Joyce, have received most attention by modernist theorists. There was
however another experience of modernity and another modernism, the hidden features of a
“feminine sensibility,” which is expressed for example in Impressionism and women
modernists’work. Even though the expression and the technique of Impressionism make the
work of male Impressionists “feminine”as well, in the paintings of women Impressionists
there are in addition feminine subjects and feminine perspective, and in Cassatt’s work there
is also the feminist point of view which make the female Impressionists’work even more
“feminine” than their male colleagues’ paintings. Her feminist perspectives offer an
alternative definition of modernism for example to the Lawrencian narratives which preach
the supremacy of the male and the subordination of the female.43
Woolf’s novels represent “the feminine modernism” in their poetic subjectivity and
ambiguous symbolism and in their anchorage to the philosophical and psychological
thinking of the epoch. Woolf is not, however, the only modernist writer whose work may be
characterized as poetic feminine modernism, for also Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood has
been compared to modern poetry by Joseph Frank (1963, 49), who thinks that it “combines
the simple majesty of a medieval morality play with the verbal subtlety and refinement of a
symbolist poem.” Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes came near to modern poetry also
through their experimentation in spatial form as they abandoned the conventional
time-sequence and story-telling practice and replaced them with the spatial intertwining of
images and words.
43
See on D. H. Lawrence e.g. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 1953, 214-224.
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10. Images of Self in the Works of Gwen John and Virginia Woolf
Self-reflexion and self-portrayal may be seen as a form of feminine modernism. In the
paintings of Gwen John and the novels of Virginia Woolf self-image is a unifying theme that
runs through their whole production. As many studies and autobiographical and biographical
texts have demonstrated, in Woolf’s novels her own history and family have an important
role. According to Mary Taubman (1985, 11), the closely-woven interaction of self and
subject is a unifying theme running through Gwen John’s entire oeuvre from youth to
maturity. Gwen John’s subjects are taken largely from her own immediate surroundings. For
the most part, especially in her earlier years, her subjects were her friends, her rooms, her cats,
her own person and the people and places which she observed when she left and returned to
her solitary lodgings. Later when she lived in the Paris suburb of Meudon, she employed a
few paid models, which were not professional models of Paris but local women and girls.
These portraits, as Taubman (ibid. 11-12) argues, are studies of a single architypal image.
This image evokes so powerfully her own presence that it seems like a distillation of self.
Taubman (ibid.)has made the same observation as I did when studying her paintings
that self-portrayal pervades her work no matter what the style or the medium is. The majority
of her figures have the same sad, deep look in their eyes and the same passive resigned
posture, which may be read as a feature of the painter’s own personality reflected in the
painting as if it were a mirror to her. In her early self-portraits, especially in the one from
1899-1900 John looks very self-assertive and resolute, and old for her age. It is possible to
think that in her own self-portraits, when she is sitting as a model for her own paintings, when
she is looking at herself
possibly in a mirror
she wants to depict her exterior image, the
self-assured determinate artist, as if she did not want to disclose her deepest feelings and
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insecurities to the public. In the portraits of other women and girls it is easier to show the
inner self or inward thoughts and feelings indirectly through the figures of others. Similarily,
Virginia Woolf’s own personality may be seen reflected in disguise in her fictional figures.
For example, her artistic self who is constantly struggling to accomplish her “vision”could
be seen as mirrored in the figures of Lily Briscoe, Orlando, Mrs Ramsay, Bernard of The
Waves, and Miss LaTrobe. Also in her recurring imagery, e.g. waves, moths, bells,
lighthouse, she seems to express the personal memories and preoccupations which she has
described in her autobiographical writings.
The majority of the female figures in John’s paintings have the same serious or
anguished expression on their faces, although in a few paintings of a nun titled Mère
Poussepin (1913-21) she painted a smiling woman. Usually her women are in a sitting
posture with their hands clasped as if they were praying. According to James Sullivan (2005,
4), religion had a central role in Gwen John’s life, she was a practicing Catholic who received
Holy Communion every day. Against this background we may interpret the seriousness of
her figures as an expression of the artist’s own religious feeling which she consciously or
unconsciously transfers to her images. Gwen’s personality, however, had contradictory
features. On the one hand, she grew increasingly detached from the world. She herself wrote
that aloneness was “nearer God, nearer reality.”On the other hand, despite the fact that she
was said to be reserved and secretive, she was also passionately violent, which caused her
suffering. (Ibid. 3) This ambivalence of her personality shows in the sometimes anguished,
sometimes sad expressions of her models. The women she painted cannot all have been so
melancholy and worried as she depicts them, so that it is possible to think that the pictures
reflect to some degree her own beliefs and personality.
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The expression of anxiety or sadness in the eyes of the majority of her figures is not,
however, visible in her early paintings depicting a model called Dorelia, such as The Student
(1903-04), or Dorelia in a Black Dress (1903-4), which are painted in a naturalistic style. In
these paintings there are not yet signs of Gwen John’s self-expression or modernist language
which she developed later. According to Mary Taubman (1985, 25), the Dorelian paintings
owe technically to her friend Ambrose McEvoy who had imparted to her the results of his
painstaking studies of the methods of old masters. In his notebooks he had made observations
in the National Gallery and the Soane Museum on the works of Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt,
Claude, Gainsborough and Hogarth. According to Taubman (ibid.), John’s portraits of this
period are painted in her own version of an “old master”technique. The paintings of this
period show more variation in the sitter’s expression, as if Gwen John had strived to be true
to the character of her model and realistically depicted her moods. The desire to represent
realistically the character of the model is in perfect harmony with her naturalistic style.
By the late 1910s, Gwen John’s painting style had reached full maturity. John restricted
herself to a very small number of subjects: a few still lifes, interiors, and landscapes, the
remainder being all female portraits. The portraits are all vertically oriented, the figure either
two-third or three-quater-length. The figure, usually turned slightly to the left, sits before a
plain backdrop or in an extremely simple interior, which is always the rue Terre Neuve studio.
She uses also a very few sitters, almost all anonymous. (Langdale 1987, 85). Her painting
becomes more simple and reduced, the style more abstract. All the details have disappeared
from the background and the room has become a uniform abstract space. The tone of colour
is the same in the figure and the background, which makes them melt together as if the whole
picture was bathing in a haze or sunlight. The model’s personality has become less important,
she has become a type, an anonymous figure with the same expression on her face. Her
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models have become instruments by means of which she is able to express her artistic self.
As Langdale points out (1987, 89), “a model was of interest to Gwen John not as an
individual but as ‘an affair of volumes’, a set of pictorial problems requiring solution.”
Virginia Woolf’s production went through a parallel development, a development towards
abstraction. Her early novels The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) are fairly
traditional novels with a plot. In her subsequent modernist novels Mrs Dalloway and To the
Lighthouse she concentrates on the aesthetic and compositional aspects and discards the plot
almost completely. In The Waves she reaches the peak in her development towards
abstraction.
In John’s modernist works, it is no longer the figures and their facial expressions which
provide the key to John’s personality. Her image of self is now expressed in the modernist
language of her paintings. She expresses her interiority through colours and abstracted forms.
In the paintings of this phase of her career it is possible to read similarities with various
modernist artists. For example, Langdale (1987, 100) notes the strong parallelism between
her pictures and those of Amedeo Modigliani’s of the late 1910s. Gwen John’s narrow-eyed,
long-nosed, elliptical faces are very similar to Modigliani’s heads indebted to African masks.
Also the light-absorbent matte surfaces, the placement and proportions of figure, the simple
poses, even the positioning of hands resemble Modigliani’s work. Other possible
connections mentioned by Langdale is for instance Paul Cézanne, for who John often
expressed a fervent admiration. Langdale has found several similarities between John’s
paintings and Cézanne’s late portraits. According to her, the artists share the detached
attitude to their subjects and the figures of both are arranged in simple, severe frontal poses.
Likewise, the brushwork is often riminiscent of Cézanne. (Ibid.)
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An important difference however, I would suggest, between Gwen John’s paintings
and those of Modigliani and Cézanne is in the atmosphere of John’s paintings that evokes a
feeling of quietness or an inward feeling, which is akin to the atmosphere of Symbolist
paintings. An almost religious peace and reticence may be sensed in her work. Her painting
technique and light, soft colours (e.g. The Convalescent, c. 1923, ill. 3) resemble those of
Odilon Redon’s Eve (1904), in which the background and the figure fuse into a harmonious
whole thereby creating a strange mysterious atmosphere. Also the monochromism of both
artists’work accentuate the fusion of the figure and the surrounding space. In her notes John
insists on the idea of “strangeness”which, according to Taubman (1985, 29), seems to link
her with the Symbolist movement and their preoccupation with allusion and mystery.
Taubman connects some of John’s pictures with their figure-containing outline and
undulating pattern to the painting of Puvis de Chavannes, whom she is known to have
admired (ibid. 30)
Gwen John never attached herself to any school or movement even though in her
written notes and letters she has praised the work of other artists (Taubman 1985, 30).44 A
distinctive feature of Gwen John’s work is her tendency to repeat a composition again and
again with very little change. The reasons for doing these variants is unknown, and, as
Langdale suggests (1987, 41), there is an element of obsessiveness in this repetition.
Obsessiveness may have been a feature of her character, as might be assumed on the basis of
her passionate relationship to Rodin that had obsessive features, or simply a result of her lack
of resources to pay for new models. Or maybe she had simply lost her interest in the
44
The names she admired range from Fra Filippo Lippi to James Ensor, from Rouault and Chagall to Piero di
Cosimo. During the 1930’s she became interested in Cubism and and the theories of André Lhote, whose
classes she attended in the summer and autumn of 1936. (Taubman 1985, 30)
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subject-matter, since in her mature work, as Langdale points out (ibid.) it is merely a vehicle
for her primary concern, the formal aspecs of painting. The pictures done in series or sets was
a characteristic especially of the last phase of her life as an artist, but as early as 1903-04
drawings of Dorelia are repeated in almost identical versions as if she wanted to explore and
re-explore a compelling image (Taubman 1985, 27).45 Virginia Woolf had the same kind of
obsessiveness towards certain themes, for example time, death, and artistic creation, as well
as her recurring metaphors and symbols, but unlike John, she always created new characters,
stories and settings in her novels.
Gwen John was interested in exploring her own image. During her career she made a
great number of self-portraits, both drawings and paintings. Perhaps the interest of women
painters to depict themselves is partly a result of a solitary life. If you have to spend your life
alone in your room and work at home perhaps the picture in the mirror becomes your only
acquintance and your only model for a painting. Gwen John spent a lot of time in her room
which became very important to her, and she also painted herself in her room, The Artist in
Her Room in Paris (1907-09), or she painted simply the room with some of her belongings
such as a parasol and a cloak on the wickerchair, which appear in many of her pictures, for
example in A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris (with flowers) (1907-09) and A Corner of
the Artist’s Room in Paris (with book) (1907-09). Although she herself is absent in the
picture, her things witness of her presence in the room.
Janet Wolff (2003, 104) has read Gwen John’s paintings of rooms without figures as
images which ask questions about who ought to be in the scene and what that person might be
45
The same kind of obsessive interest to explore the same subject may be found in the self-portraits of Helene
Schjerfbeck. She made during her career a fine series of self-images, which were not, however, unlike John’s
pictures, exact repetitions but variations of the same subject-matter.
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doing. Wolff connects John’s painting The Teapot (1915-16) with the missing figure as an
invitation to reflect on our assumption about gender in the context of the history of
representations of the same kind of domestic scenes which John’s picture of a room shows.
She connects the painting with Victorian images of the domestic scene where the association
of women and the serving of afternoon tea is taken for granted. In A Corner of the Artist’s
Room in Paris (with flowers) already the title reveals that the missing person is the artist
herself. As Wolff (ibid.) suggests, the parasol and the cloak tells us that she has been out of
her room on a walk or is about to go out. From the other version we may also assume that she
often sits reading by the window in that wicker chair and that she leads a simple and perhaps
lonely life, since the room is very ascetic. Wolff analyzes another version of John’s painting
A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris (1907-10) which she relates to the discussion on the
public and the private sphere. In her reading, “the interior is made to stand for the exterior,
the artist’s parasol and jacket referring to her recent excursion into the male domain, the
window and blurred outline of a building indicating the city she has chosen as her home but
in which she cannot feel at ease” (Wolff 1990, 59). Wolff pays attention to the fact that
women’s access to the public and their exclusion from it can be portrayed indirectly through
allusions, as in Gwen John’s painting.
Another aspect related to the theme of artist’s room is the possiblity of women to
choose their studios, working spaces, models, and materials. The working conditions
probably had an effect on the choice of women artists’subjects and sometimes even the
quality of their painting. For example, as I mentioned earlier, Gwen John’s limited
subject-matters, the obsessive repetitions and the use of the same sitters may simply have
been a result of her poverty and exclusion from the male-dominated art circles. But the
choice of subjects may just as well been a result of her own personality and preferences, and
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the versatility of subjects does not necessarily guarantee the quality of art. In A Room of
One’s Own Virginia Woolf claimed that “a woman must have money and a room of her own
if she is to write fiction”(Woolf 1994, 6). In the essay Woolf pays attention to women’s
seclusion from the surrounding world which has effects on their writing: “If Jane Austen
suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed
upon her”(ibid. 74). Woolf argues that a woman needs to be free of the child bearing and
rearing duties and the domestic work, and to have peace and freedom of the mind to be able
to concentrate, if she is going to write fiction. And she must earn enough to live by her work.
Gwen John may be considered lucky to have possessed “a room of her own”to be able to
create art. According to Langdale (1987, 28) Gwen John supported herself meagrely by
posing as an artist’s model. She painted, occasionally exhibiting and selling her pictures. It
was an independent and relatively solitary existence. But despite her humble surroundings,
she loved her room and was even proud of it. It became an important place for her, her
working room and a space where she liked to spend time in the evening reading a book by the
window or watching out while eating. (Ibid.) Taubman (1985, 18) explains that she regarded
her room as a refuge and a consolation, almost as an extension of herself.
In the context of Gwen John’s paintings and Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘a room’may be
conceived as a symbol of freedom and independence. In Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room ‘a
room’has other connotations which are related to memory and the theme of absence and
presence which Janet Wolff took up in connection with John’s painings of her room, but my
reading of absence and presence is not related to the gendering of the private and the public.
As I have suggested earlier in chapter 7, Jacob’s Room is a metaphor of still life, nature
morte, because Jacob himself is absent in the novel which is meant to be a description of his
life. The narrator depicts the furniture and things in Jacob’s room, but the person living there
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is always absent. The same way as with John’s painting, we can infer certain aspects of the
tenant from the objects in the room. Jacob’s room is a student’s room full of books. We learn
from his books that he is interested in philosophy, history and literature and from the
reproductions of paintings we learn that he likes art. And like Gwen John’s artist’s room, also
Jacob’s room has a wicker chair: “One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks, though no one sits
there”(JR, 37). But somebody is present in the room, somebody visits Jacob’s room and sees
all these things there even though Jacob is absent. The visitor is the narrator of the novel, and
since Woolf probably wrote the novel to explore the life of her death brother Thoby, it is
possible to think — if we adopt an autobiographical reading of the novel — that it is Virginia
Woolf herself who visits Jacob’s/Thoby’s room and all the other places where Jacob/Thoby
frequented in quest for the mystery and secrets that Thoby left behind when he suddenly died
of typhoid fever. As Pamela J. Transue (1986, 61) suggests, Woolf’s sense of loss was so
great and she was left with so many unanswered questions about her brother that Jacob’s
Room is in some sense an attempt to answer those questions. Therefore, it is possible to read
Jacob’s room and its objects as a metaphor of memory. In a sense the novel is a self-image of
Woolf, her relationship with her brother and the memories of him.
In Jacob’s Room Woolf’s self-image is not reflecting her artistic self and aspirations in
the same sense as in her more artistically mature novels. Like in Gwen John’s earlier
naturalistic self-portraits and portraits in which the features of her own face or personality are
displayed in the countenance of the depicted model but not so much in the artistic language
which she was still in search, in Jacob’s Room only the memories of Woolf connected to her
brother are depicted, not Woolf’s self-image as an artist. In my autobiographical
interpretation of To the Lighthouse Woolf draws the self-portrait of an artist and her
discovery of artistic language and maturity. In the autobiographical reading the novel is a
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portrait of Woolf’s mother who is represented by Mrs Ramsay. Mrs Ramsay, who is the
archetypal mother, full of love and empathy, can be seen as the representation of a feminine
principle, and Mr Ramsay, the alter ego of Woolf’s father, stands for the hard, rational and
insensitive masculinity. If Lily Briscoe is understood as Woolf’s self-image of an artist who
is seeking her artistic “language” and breakthrough which she at the end of the novel
accomplishes, we may think that Woolf is inclined to favour the feminine principle as more
important for artistic creativity despite the fact that she believed in the androgynous ideal.
Mrs Ramsay encourages and inspires by her own intuitive creativity and sensitivity the
artistic development of Lily. The point which Woolf is making, as Pamela J. Transue (1986,
90) notes, is that in spite of their differences, Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe have an essential
element in common, their female consciousness. It is not difficult to agree with Transue
when she sees a feminist objective to have been accomplished in the novel’s essentially
feminine view of the world. If we compare Lily’s artistic experimentation in
Post-Impressionist style to Woolf’s modernist experimentation in To the Lighthouse we may
say that Woolf’s self-image as an artist and her growth into artistic maturity is portrayed in
the novel. If we compare Woolf to Gwen John, we see a parallel development towards the
expression of the artistic self in her work which comes through in her discovery of a unified
modernist language and mystical silence that consistently characterize the paintings of her
mature period.
If To the Lighthouse is more a representation of Woolf’s artistic search and discovery
of her own voice, The Waves is a representation of this new language, a language that differs
markedly from the leading representatives of masculine modernism. It is a poetic and
mythical language which is firmly anchored in Woolf’s own personality and her femininity.
As Transue (1986, 128) says, the masculine literary tradition has been vanguished in The
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Waves, since it was already a feminist act for Woolf to have developed a form in which her
own vision of reality could prevail. The water imagery is Woolf’s private imagery which is
connected to her childhood and the times she spent at the seashore, and which haunted her
through her life until her death when “symbolically”she even drowned herself in the waves.
The water imgagery of The Waves may be seen as an archetypal image which for Woolf is
part of her own identity and femininity, but which also has connections to many mythologies
and and to Hélène Cixous feminist philosophy where water is the feminine element par
excellence:
But look, our seas are what we make of them, full of fish or not, opaque or transparent,
red or black, high or smooth, narrow or bankless; and we are ourselves sea, sand, coral,
seaweed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves… More or less wavily sea, earth,
sky
what matter repuff us? We know how to speak of them all. (Cixous 2001, 2052)
Because water is closely connected to Woolf’s own childhood memories it is possible to
think that water and the waves means to her the comforting security of the mother’s womb
the same way as it does in Cixous’mythological water imagery where woman is protected by
the all-powerful Good Mother who shields the writing woman from danger (see Moi 1985,
117). And since the waves embraces everything in Woolf’s novel from the structure of the
novel to its rhythmic alternation of voices by the six protagonists and to its rhythmic sentence
and interludes dipicting the waves, The Waves in its architypal lyricism may be seen as her
version of the female writing, the famous “feminine sentence” which she discussed in A
Room of One’s Own (Woolf 1994, 83-4). For Woolf, while emphasizing textuality as
difference, feminine modernism means also the discovery of writing as voice, presence and
origin. Thus the discovery of her own feminine voice in The Waves is her most original
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contribution to feminine modernism. Feminine modernism, a room of their own, could be
found, as Randall Stevenson (1992, 42) suggests, in the private domain of the mind, for
women writers, such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, were especially inclined to
develop new narrative forms in which the workings of consciousness are separated from the
external reality and the object world. In A Room of One’s Own Woolf writes about a
particular form of exile or exclusion of women writers from a male-dominated culture and
society:
Again if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of
consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor
of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical.
(Woolf 1994, 105)
This sense of exclusion, as Stevenson (ibid. 187) explains, Woolf sees as having
consequences for the language of women’s writing. In her essay she remarks that, for a
woman novelist,
It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them
for pleasure. [… ] That is a man’s sentence [… ] It was a sentence unsuited for a
woman’s use. (Woolf 1994, 83-4)
If we now return to Gwen John, and take a look at her contribution to feminine modernism
we may found a similar kind of inwardness and presence of the artist in her paintings as in
Virginia Woolf’s novels. In her paintings, whether they are portraits of others, self-portraits
or interior views without human figures, there is always the presence of the artist to be sensed
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in them, as if she were painting always the same picture in which her personality and inward
feelings are expressed. John’s strong presence and involvement in her painting has been
witnessed by one of her models who almost lost her own identity when the artist made the
sitter to look like her: “She takes my hair down & does it like her own. She wants to draw the
shape of my head. She has me sit as she does & I feel the absorption of her personality as I
sit”(Langdale 1987, 89).
The inwardness which is a common characteristic of John’s and Woolf’s feminine
modernism is in John’s art manifested in the mystical silent ambience that the uniform colour
tones and softness of forms create. In Woolf’s novels the inwardness is translated by the
mystical immersion with nature that is akin to Romanticism and the architypal imagery
related to femininity. The lyrical quality of both John’s and Woolf’s work gives them a
special voice within modernism that is quite different from the canonical works of male
modernism, for example those by D.H. Lawrence and Picasso who celebrated masculine
primitivism and virility, or the male writers and artists whose focus was on the exterior world
of war, adventure and technology.
11. Feminine Versions of Post-Impressionism in Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was closely in touch with the art world. According to Sue Roe (2000, 166)
the profound influence of French painting and its subjectivism on Vanessa Bell gradually
filtered into Virginia Woolf’s writing as well. Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay “Mr Bennett
and Mrs Brown” (1924) that “in and about December, 1910, human character changed”
(Woolf 1966a, 320). With this sentence Virginia Woolf is probably referring to the famous
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exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” which Roger Fry organized in 1910
introducing Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art to England (Wolff 1990, 51;
Torgovnick 1990, 85-6). Roger Fry’s ideas and theories about modern art were influential
among the Bloomsbury group whose members also Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and her
husband Clive were. Fry collected his essays on modern art theory and African art in his
major work Vision and Design (1920) which is considered of immense importance in the
development of modern art. Fry was the most important art theorist in Britain and Vision and
Design was the volume which made primitive objects in England high art and made them
significant for an emerging modernist aesthetics. (Torgovnick 1990, 87)
In Virginia Woolf’s novels and Vanessa Bell’s paintings we can detect resemblancies
with Roger Fry’s formalistic principles of modern art. In his “An Essay on Aesthetics,”
which Woolf was reading (Roe 2000, 168), Fry argued that “the graphic arts are the
expression of the imaginative life rather than a copy of actual life”and exemplified his claim
by referring to children who never draw from nature, but express mental images coming from
their imagination (Fry 1961, 25-26). Among his most important formal principles in a work
of art is the principle of unity, which according to him is “necessary for our restful
contemplation of the work of art as a whole, since if it lacks unity we cannot contemplate it in
its entirety.”In order to achieve this unity in a picture the artist needs to have a central line
around which the attractions of the eye are balanced. (Ibid. 34). Virginia Woolf was
interested in Fry’s ideas of unity and the central line, and it may have had an impact on her
formal design of To the Lighthouse. She argued, while discussing the matter with Fry, that
the only function of the lighthouse in the novel was to focus the eye about the central “line”
of her novel: “I meant nothing by the Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the
middle of the book to hold the design together”(Bell 1972, 129).
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Other ideas on her “formal designs”of the novels may have come from discussions
with painters. For example, earlier when Woolf was writing Mrs Dalloway the French painter
Jacques Raveret had suggested to her that she might achieve simultaneity, which is a natural
element in painting, “by some graphic expedient such as placing the word in the middle of
the page and surrounding it radially with associated ideas”(ibid. 106). Following this idea
suggested by Raveret it is possible to read the surface design of To the Lighthouse in terms of
a central line. The “Time Passes”section in the middle of the book may be considered to
compose the central line around which the other chapters “The Window“ and “The
Lighthouse”are arranged. Temporal distance is important for the accomplishment of Lily’s
artistic vision because it will be reached only through the artist’s growth during the hard
times symbolically represented by the middle section of the novel. Thus the central line of To
the Lighthouse is essential both for the artistic vision and the personal growth, not only Lily’s
but also Mr Ramsay’s. The structural design of Woolf’s novel may thus be seen as an
example of Clive Bell’s notion of “significant form,”a concept referring to formalism in art,
but which in Woolf’s novel has also meaningful content.
In literature an equivalent to abstract art is hard to conceive, and even if Woolf
experimented with the form of the novel she never departed from the interplay of form and
meaning, not even in her most “abstract”work The Waves. Vanessa Bell made a few purely
abstract paintings, which were in accord with Clive Bell’s assertion that “significant form,”
as opposed to meaningful content, was the key ingredient in art. But after 1915 Vanessa Bell
lost her interest in pure abstraction because subject matter was so important to her (Tate
Collection 2004, 1). Nevertheless, she was always interested in abstracted shapes and figures
and the emphasis of many of her paintings is on form and colour rather than on narrative and
representational content. As an example of this kind of painting by Bell is Studland Beach (c.
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1912, ill. 4). The painting shows a group of people in their leisure activities on a sunny beach,
although the subject is not easy to understand by just looking at the painting without the help
of the title. The painting is quite close to an abstraction, for the subject is reduced and
simplified to its essential components. The effect and meaning of the picture is mediated by
its composition and colours. The semiabstract figures and diagonal lines representing the
beach line and the contrast of the blue of the sea and the whiteness of the sand communicate
the atmosphere and the feeling of a sunny day spent on the beach which the artist has
captured on her canvas.
In Bell’s painting it is possible to see affinity with Matisse’s paintings such as La Joie
de vivre (1905-6) depicting leasure time in nature with the simplified forms of the figures
inspired by primitive art. One major difference is Matisse’s uninhibited postures and the
naked bodies which are in deep contrast to Bell’s clothed distant figures whose faces are
hidden by huge hats. In Bell’s painting the degree of abstraction is greater than in Matisse’s
picture and the connection to primitive art is less clear. This more sophisticated version of
primitivism by Bell shows that she was more interested in depicting “real figures”on the
beach than the naked “day dreams”of men artists.
Matisse’s paintings of naked bodies and Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
(1907) of naked prostitutes are constructed fantasy pictures that have no connection to real
life situations, whereas Vanessa Bells’paintings are based on reality and real incidents in her
life. For example, Studland Beach is closely related to Bell’s life for she used to spend
holidays on Studland Beach in Dorset with her Bloomsbury group friends (Tate Collection
2004, 1). The painting is linked with her personal feelings and memories that she has
recorded also in photographs of her relatives on the same beach. In a photograph depicting
Virginia Woolf and Clive Bell sitting on the Studland Beach in 1910 (see Humm 2002, 103),
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which was taken the same year when Bell painted her picture, the composition is construed
with the same elements as the painting: in the background there are the beach huts and in the
left corner in the foreground two figures sitting on the sand. In the photograph parallelism
and symmetric relations are important compositional elements. The painting with its
two-dimensional, simplified and abstracted figures and objects emphasizes form and colour
rather than overt representational content, but despite its formalistic modernist interests, the
personal experience and “sunny memories” which are the origin of the painting is
communicated through its fresh colours of blue and white and the light reflected from the
sand. Thus we may understand Studland Beach as an expression of personal experience of
particular emotion which the artist translates by means of form, space, colour and perspective
to the spectators.
Virginia Woolf’s novels also had their origin in her personal experience and memories.
To the Lighthouse is written on the basis of Woolf’s childhood memories of her mother and
father, and the same way as in Vanessa Bell’s Studland Beach, this autobiographical reality
has been transformed into a modernist work of art that through its structural patterns, poetic
language and symbolism conveys the meanings and feelings that were important to the writer,
and on the basis of the story the reader composes his/her own meanings.
In To the Lighthouse Woolf shows that she was aware of the principles and innovations
of modernist painting when she depicts Mr Bankes reflecting the problems related to
representation and likeness in Lily’s painting. The simplified forms and bright colours which
are central in Vanessa Bell’s and other Post-Impressionists’paintings (cf. Matisse, Gauguin,
van Gogh, Denis, Bonnard) are also Lily’s principal means of expression in her painting of
Mrs Ramsay and James. The problems she has to solve are in deep contrast with those of
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traditional representational art. Her aim is not to achieve verisimilitude, but to find the right
colours, shapes and shadows which communicate her purposes:
Nothing could be cooler and quieter. Taking out a penknife, Mr Bankes tapped the
canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to indicate by the triangular purple
shape, ‘just there?’he asked.
It was Mrs Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objection — that no
one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt at likeness, she said.
For what reason had she introduced them then? Why indeed? — except that if there, in
that corner, it was bright, here, in this, she felt the need of darkness. Simple, obvious,
commonplace, as it was, Mr Bankes was interested. Mother and child then — objects
of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty — might
be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow without irreverence.
But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in his sense. There were other
senses, too, in which one might reverence them. By a shadow here and a light there, for
instance. Her tribute took that form, if, as she vaguely supposed, a picture must be a
tribute. A mother and child might be reduced to a shadow without irreverence. A light
here required a shadow there. (TL, 61-62)
Here Virginia Woolf is introducing new thinking and new conceptions about art to replace
the prevailing ones concerning the representation of reality and the likeness of sitters that had
for centuries been the principles of art. According to Post-Impressionist thinking, a purple
triangle could represent human bodies, because the artist wanted to express in the painting
other things than likeness. Like her protagonist, Woolf herself uses in her fiction modernist
means to convey her meanings. In modernist novel new aesthetic principles came to replace
the conventions of the Realist novel which Woolf questioned in her essays. In “Modern
Fiction”(1966b, 106) she wrote:
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[… ] if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could base his work upon his own
feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no
love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn
on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.
Her experimentation in the form of the novel Woolf took farthest in The Waves, which, with
the description of the characters’consciousness, tested the limits of the novel genre. The
almost total absence of plot was replaced by the poetic structural design with the regularly
placed descriptions of nature marking the passage of time. As in the Post-Impressionist
paintings by Lily and Vanessa Bell, in the novel, detailed conventional representation of
outer reality was not the concern of the novelist. Woolf’s interest was focused rather on the
relationship between space and time, which, as Sue Roe (2000, 183) argues, she explored by
means of a manifold structure which brings the reader into an experiment in simultanism.
Virginia Woolf presented one version of simultanism in Jacob’s Room, as Roe
suggests (2000, 179), when she opened out contrasting glimpses, but as I have demonstrated
in chapter 5, it was especially in her city novel Mrs Dalloway that she fully experimented
with simultanist techniques, juxtapostion and multiple perspective. Like Woolf, the
Post-Impressionists explored simultaneity, for example Picasso in showing different
perspectives and dimensions in a single face. But even though Woolf used the modernist
language of the Cubists and showed an interest in modern technology in Mrs Dalloway
thereby resembling the Futurists, I argue that her main concern was not in pure formalism.
She was equally interested in exloring the human psyche and the secrets of life and death by
means of new methods of narration.
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Although Woolf mastered and developed experimental techniques alongside with the
leading male modernists, she, however, created her own feminine version of modernism and
concentrated on issues that were important to her. For example, she did not show interest in
the themes of sexuality and primitivism which fascinated male modernists such as D. H.
Lawrence, Matisse, and Picasso. As Marianne Torgovnick (1990, 102) explains, modern
artists typically valued primitive statues’allusions to conception, gestation, and birth, but
often read these allusions to the reproductive cycle as displays of coarse sexuality,
interpreting the generative as the pornographic. This pornographic interpretation of
primitivism appears widely in male Surrealism and Expressionism. Picasso’s Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon, which is an example of Expressionism rather than early Cubism,
shows this pornographic interest through a depiction of prostitutes which it shared with many
works by German Expressionists.
Like her sister Virginia, Vanessa Bell took no interest in primitivism as a theme. In her
art primitivism may be discerned only in the drawing technique and simplicity of forms. As
Cinzia Eich (2004, 3) argues, Bell’s paintings show how modernism can be used to give
dignity to the representation of women in art. As an example of the difference of
representation of women in modernist art is Bell’s painting The Tub (1917) that depicts the
popular theme of bathers painted by many male modernists, including Cézanne, Degas and
Matisse. In Bell’s painting we can recognize Cézanne-like “false”perspectives as the tub is
depicted from above as if the water was about to spill over the brim and the female figure is
painted from the front. Bell’s female figure is not depicted as an object of male desire as for
example in many paintings by Matisse representing odalisques, but as a shy woman who is
taking a bath. Bell’s painting is depicting a real situation in a woman’s life thus refusing an
intruding masculinist gaze and giving place to more psychological interpretations of the
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painting. In its realistic handling of the subject and also in the depiction of the tub from above
and the tub’s round shape, it resembles Degas’Le Tub (1885-86). Like Degas’painting,
Bell’s picture appears to be based on a real life situation, and in fact Vanessa Bell had taken
photographs of her children with a tub in which the relations between figures and the tub are
the same as in her painting (see Humm 2002, 108). Bell’s brushwork and simplified figures
resemble more Cézanne’s modernist primitive language, but the realist attitude is more akin
to Degas and Impressionism.
A special form of female modernism that Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell practiced
was domestic photography. The photo albums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell are
revealing documents of their interests in modernist aesthetics and new forms of expression,
even though they do not contain any professional photographs. In a recent study Modernist
Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (2002)
Maggie Humm has investigated Woolf’s and Bell’s domestic photography in their photo
albums and found in them visual connections to modernist aesthetics. Humm claims that the
modernity in Woolf’s albums is striking, owing much to Woolf’s knowledge of modernism,
Cézanne’s painting, Eisenstein and the German cinema (Humm 2002, 61-61). From the
photographs presented in Humm’s book, however, Woolf’s connections to modernist
painting is hard to see, but in the sequential arrangement of the photos in the albums it is
possible to detect the inspiration of montage technique in the alternation of the images or the
slightly differing angles.
Vanessa Bell’s modernism is easier to discover in the photographs shown by Humm
than Woolf’s photographic modernism. I already discussed Bell’s use of repetitive patterns
and parallelism in her Studland Beach painting and photograph. The same kind of parallelism
of the figures’posture is to be seen in one of Bell’s photographs of her sons Quentin and
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Julian posing naked (see photo in Humm 2002, 127) and in a photograph taken of Virginia
Woolf and Clive Bell sitting in identical positions (see photo ibid. 100). This interest in
parallelism and other compositional elements could be read as Bell’s version of ‘significant
form’, as her interest in the formalism of Post-Impressionism.
A common theme, the motif of the window, may be found in Bell’s photographs and
paintings as well as in To the Lighthouse. In the novel’s first chapted titled “The Window”
Mrs Ramsay frequently sits by the window looking at the lighthouse. As Humm (2002, 107-8)
points out, the leitmotif of the window frame is a constant device in Vanessa Bell’s paintings,
in her still lifes in front of a window which runs through her work and in her reworkings of
the motif in her paintings of the 1920s and in Charleston Garden (1933). The window motif
appears also in a photograph depicting Vanessa and her son Julian Bell sitting on her lap
positioned within a window frame (ibid. 110). According to Humm (ibid. 107), the
positioning and arrangement of Vanessa’s clothes resemble the madonna iconography of
Renaissance painting. Lena Sundin (2004, 51) has proposed that also in Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse Mrs Ramsay is beeing visualized by Lily Briscoe as a Madonna through a
window. Bell’s interest towards the window motif may well have an autobiographical
background, for Bell treasured the photograph of her mother, Julia Stephen, “leaning against
a closed window, her face turned to the light”(Spalding 1983, 153). According to Frances
Spalding, a window also plays an important role in her painting The Conversation
(sometimes called Three Women), and as Spalding (ibid.) explains, “the view of the window
was to become a popular motif during the twenties as it satisfied the modernist concern with
the flatness of the picture plane, the window frame forcing up the external scene into a firmer
relationship with the picture surface.”
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CONCLUSION
Virginia Woolf used many of the devices which were central in visual modernism. Her work
may be compared to Cubism owing to her intellectual interest in the techniques of
simultanism and perspective, and to Futurism because of her interest in the depiction of
modern city life and technological innovations. Cubism and Futurism in art were masculine
movements, developed mostly by men, and the Futurists denying women access to the
Futurist group were openly hostile to them. Since Woolf was hardly fascinated by the
Futurist ideas, it is possible to think that the allusions to modern machines which she makes
in Mrs Dalloway have come indirectly to her work. For example, Marcel Proust used similar
devices in his A la recherche du temps perdu with his enthralled visions of powered flight
and the speed of the motor car (Stevenson 1992, 14). For, as Stevenson (ibid.) points out,
many contemporary authors, particularly the modernists, viewed the new technologies and
stresses of modern life more sceptically than the Futurists, especially after the First World
War. And unlike Futurism which preached that “Time and Space died yesterday”with the
words of Marinetti, modernism neither accepted nor welcomed the death of space and time
(ibid.). Quite the reverse, as the example of Virginia Woolf in this study reveals, modernism
kept these dimensions alive and reshaped them into different stylistic and structural
solutions.
Woolf’s interest in “the moment,”which was central in many modernist works from
Proust to Joyce, is one example of her interest in the questions of time. Besides being a
central modernist concern in literature, “the moment”meant to Woolf something personal.
One of her central themes in her production is the search for permanency and unity in chaotic
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existence. In her work the moment is also connected to artistic vision which in its
unexpectedness and and randomness can be compared to the Impressionists’ and
photographers’visions.
Woolf was also interested in experimenting with the element of space thus joining
other modernist writers (James Joyce, Djuna Barnes) in their attempts to “imitate”the visual
arts. In her one-day novels Woolf used techniques of cinema such as flashback and montage,
and created effects of simultaneity which may be thought to give her works pictorial
dimensions. This spatial form is one manifestation of my attempt to see her as a visualizer
and connect her to visual modernism. She created visual or pictorial effects also by means of
metaphor, ekphrasis and description.
One of my central aims was to study the relationship between word and image in
Virginia Woolf’s novels. The study showed that in Woolf’s texts it is possible to find
equivalents for visual images, which may be called visualizations in verbal language, by
means of different subterfuges such as description, metaphor and ekphrasis. In my study I
have understood metaphor as a verbal image of a mental image, according to the definition
by Mieke Bal, but I have additionally wanted to emphasize the ambiguity of metaphors, since
modernist literature and art may be characterized by ambiguity, symbolism and
suggestiveness. Metaphoric images in Woolf resemble visual images because they, too, are
hard to analyze due to their inherent continuous nature. In general literary theories and
literary studies on Virginia Woolf’s fiction, the terms of metaphor and symbol are used more
or less as synonyms, and thus also in my study there is overlapping in the use of these
concepts, although I have tried to see different connotations in them, the metaphor being
nearer to images and symbols nearer to verbal language.
181
In Woolf’s novels the narrator depicts visual perceptions by means of colours, lights,
shadows and their effects on nature or by describing things and furniture in a room. These
visualizations are quick flashes in the consciousness of the characters which change into
some other thoughts or associations. Description is a usual device in all kinds of novels, not
just in modernist texts, but in Woolf’s and other modernist novels these visualizations are in
constant state of change, since they depict the incessant flux in a character’s consciousness.
Therefore, Woolf’s descriptions of visual perceptions in the character’s mind may be thought
to approach cinematic effects of changing images or the fugitiveness of Impressionist
paintings, as Impressionist painters were trying to capture the effects of change and
movement of living experience.
I also set as my goal to discover analogies between Woolf’s novels and the visual arts
concerning modernism’s central ideas and aesthetic devices. I have analyzed Woolf’s novels
for instance in terms of Impressionism’s central ideas such as the depiction of momentary
impressions, which try to imitate the contingency and objectivity of real life by means of
sketchiness and imprecision. Photographic reality was the Impressionists’objective in their
attempts to capture the fleeting moment. Their paintings may be understood, however, more
as expressions of subjectivity than objective depictions of reality. In Woolf’s novels as well
there are always signs of subjectivity, even in the apparently objective descriptive interludes
of The Waves.
Freud’s investigations of dream and the unconscious influenced art and literature and
modernism’s urge to examine the mind more completely than in earlier fiction seems likely
to have resulted from the study and interest in psychology and psychoanalysis at the
beginning of the twentieth century. In many male modernists’work Freud’s influence shows
in the interest in sexuality, as for example in D. H. Lawrence’s production, or in the male
182
Surrealists’and Expressionists’art and literature. In Woolf’s work Freudian influences may
be found in the stream-of-consciousness technique, even though it depicts more the
conscious thoughts of the characters than their subconscious. In Mrs Dalloway Woolf
depicted also hallucinations of a mentally ill person, and discusses the treatment of a
shell-shocked person. But more than this interest in psychic treatment, Freud’s possible
influence on Woolf may be seen in her suggestive ambigious symbolism and metaphorical
imagery that are akin to Freudian dream symbolism. If Lawrence was more intrigued by
sexuality, primitiveness, the Freudian Oidipus complex and themes related to masculine
virility, Woolf’s was rather more interested in the relationship between the masculine and the
feminine principle. I have interpreted her to have chosen the feminine principle as more
important, at least as far as creativity and inspiration are concerned, and maternal metaphors
such as water in The Waves can be thought to underline this preference.
My third central aim was to discuss the work of some modernist women artists and
compare their paintings to Woolf’s modernism. I have connected Woolf to certain schools of
modernism which I have interpreted in gendered terms. I have regendered Impressionism as
feminine after it had been gendered as masculine by many critics of the twentieth century,
though originally in the nineteenth century Impressionism was gendered as feminine. This
gendering and regendering of art shows that art schools and styles are what you want them to
be, that art like everything else may be used to serve different purposes. My aim in gendering
Impressionism as feminine has served the purpose of finding common characteristics
between female artists and Virginia Woolf in order to show that not all modernist art was
masculine and that there is another way of analyzing modernism.
I have not intended to argue that all women are alike and all women’s art share the
same characteristics, for surely among women modernists there are many kinds of
183
modernisms as well. Instead, to discuss features of modernism that many important women
artists had in common with Virginia Woolf is an attempt to show that there existed another
modernism besides the one discussed in the official history of modernism written from male
perspective. Some schools of modernism have been seen in my analysis being closer to the
aims and personalities of Woolf and the women artists, expressing characteristics that were
important to them such as emotion, inwardness and lyricism. These features may be
associated to Impressionism, Symbolism and Surrealism, movements which were a
continuation of the Romantic tradition in art and literature. All these movements stressed
features related to subjectivity and ambiguity, and especially Impressionism and Surrealism
have been strongly anchored on the concept of femininity. But unlike male Surrealists’
conception of woman as the mystical “other,”women artists and Virginia Woolf discussed
femininity and its representations in ways that were connected to women’s reality.
Many men artists and writers represented women in their art as an object of desire or
even in pornographic terms. In women artists’work femininity and woman as the other is
seen from a wholly different perspective. In Virginia Woolf’s novels an important feature is
her search of creativity and identity through her own history and family, especially the
importance of her mother to her life and art shows in her work. In Gwen John’s art her strong
personality is filtered through her paintings and her self-image is visible not only in her
self-portraits, but also in portraits and still-lifes, and in the modernist language she uses. Even
though women artists used similar techniques and methods in their work as male artists, the
content and subject-matter were different. Many male artists and writers depicted their
fantasies in pictures of prostitutes (Manet, Picasso, Matisse) and novels dealing with phallic
sexuality, war and adventure (Joyce, Lawrence, Conrad) thus giving a more “superficial”
look on life and concentrating on the outer world. Women, on the other hand, depicted
184
women’s everyday life realistically (Cassatt, Morisot, John, Bell, Woolf) or their inner world
(John, Bell and Woolf).
The innovations and new ideas of modernist art such as fragmented form and
experimentation in perspective meant rebellion against the conventions of realistic and
representational art. Modernist literature was in rebellion against the realistic novel and
conventional poetry. As my study suggests, the artists and writers were trying to abolish the
conventions and boundaries between different art forms, for example by bringing the visual
arts closer to verbal art in their attempts to depict space in literature and time in painting and
by using the cinematic techniques such as montage in literature, or by trying to imitate the
contingency and momentariness of a photograph in the Impressionist painting or in the
stream-of-consciousness novel. This mixing of different art forms was perhaps most
conspicuous in the work of Marcel Duchamp, a pioneer of a new expressive form of the
text-related art of the 1960s, or René Magritte who with Duchamp is the initiator of
conceptual art.
In modernist poetry, on the other hand, Apollinaire with his poem-ideograms created
visual images by means of words on a page. In combining the verbal and the visual the
novelists were more “conservative”and their experimentation remained within the confines
of verbal language. Instead, many of them made experiments within verbal language by
remodeling and radicalizing the grammatical rules and renewing vocabulary. Virginia Woolf
was also a renewer of the novel, especially with her experimental novel The Waves, in which
she abandoned nearly all the conventions of the novel. Instead of a novel we could talk about
an elegy or a drama or a combination of them. The Waves could be seen as Woolf’s version of
écriture féminine, because in its originality and lyricism it is unlike all the other works of
modernism and it may be seen as giving an expression to Woolf’s association of feminine
185
architypal imagery, creativity and writing. Woolf’s feminine writing is made of impressions
and colours which together constitute the texture of human life, and thus her reality is
communicated emotionally rather than intellectually. The difference of Woolf’s writing
compared with the male modernist writing may be found in her almost complete lack of
narrative interest which most leading modernist writers such as Conrad, Lawrence and Joyce
did not abandon. It is as difficult to define feminine modernism as to define feminine writing ,
for as Hélène Cixous (2001, 2046) writes, “a feminine practice of writing [… ] can never be
theorized, enclosed, coded
which does not mean that it does not exist.” Woolf wrote
antinovels, and particularly The Waves in drawing attention to the artificiality of her created
world could from today’s perspective be regarded as a predecessor of the post-modernist
novel, the same way as Duchamp and Magritte in their self-reflexiveness have been seen as
predecessors of post-modernist art.
186
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— — . The Waves. 1931. London: Triad/Panther Books, Granada Publishing,1977. (W)
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199
Wiget, Erik. Virginia Woolf und die Konzeption der Zeit in ihrer Werken. Abhandlung zur
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— — . AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States. Ithica and
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— — . Collected Essays by Virginia Woolf, Volume Two. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966b.
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— — . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 1, 1915-1919. Harmondworth, Middlesex,
England: Penguin Books, 1977.
— — . Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing. Ed. Barrett, Michèle. San Diego, New York and
London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1979.
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Electronic sources:
Eich, Cinzia. “Vanessa Bell.” <http://www.artviews.org/eich.htm>. Web-page consulted 8
September 2004.
200
Nichols, K. L. “Mary Cassatt’s Lost Mural and Other Exhibits at the 1893 Exposition.”In
<http://members.cox.net/academia/cassatt.html>. Web-page consulted 27 October
2005.
Sullivan,
James.
“Gwen
John
—
Art
and
Faith
in
the
Shadows.” In
<http://www.catholic.net/RCC/Periodical/Crisis-0995/gwen1.html>.
Web-page
consulted 15 November 2005
Tate
Collection.
<http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid>.
Web-page
consulted 8 September 2004.
Paintings and photographs discussed:
1. Illustrations:
1. Morisot, Berthe. Woman at her Toilet. 1875. Oil on canvas. 23¾×31¾ in (60×80 cm). Art
Institute of Chicago (Stickney Fund). Impressionists. By Denis Thomas. London, New
York, Sydney, Toronto: Hamlyn, 1975. 55.
2. Cassatt, Mary. The Little Sisters. c. 1885. Oil on canvas. 18×21½ in (45×55 cm). Glasgow
Art Gallery. Impressionists. By Denis Thomas. London, New York, Sydney, Toronto:
Hamlyn, 1975. 76.
3. John, Gwen. The Convalescent. c. 1923. Oil on canvas. 16 ×13 (41×33). Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge. Gwen John. By Mary Taubman. London: Scolar Press, 1985.
Plate 50.
201
4. Bell, Vanessa. Studland Beach. c. 1912. Oil on canvas. 76.2×101.6 (30×40). Tate Gallery,
London. Post-Impressionism. By Belinda Thomson. London: Tate Gallery Publishing,
1998. 67.
2. Paintings:
Bell, Vanessa. The Conversation/Three Windows. 1913-1916. Oil on vcanvas. 86×81. Roger
Fry’s Collection.
<http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/gallery/f491cb65.html>. Web-page
consulted 7 July 2005.
— — . Studland Beach. c. 1912. Oil on canvas. 76.2×101.6 (30×40). Tate Gallery, London.
Post-Impressionism. By Belinda Thomson. London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1998.
67.
— — . The Tub. 1917. Oil and gouache on canvas. Unconfirmed: 1803×1664 mm. Tate
Gallery, London.
<http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=908&searchid...>. Web-page
consulted 8 September 2004.
Cassatt, Mary. The Bath. 1892. Oil on canvas. 99.2×66.1 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago
(Robert A. Waller Fund). Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories
of Art. By Griselda Pollock. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.59.
— — . The Little Sisters. c. 1885. Oil on canvas. 18×21½ in (45×55 cm). Glasgow Art
Gallery. Impressionists. By Denis Thomas. London, New York, Sydney, Toronto:
Hamlyn, 1988. 76.
202
— — . Lydia at a Tapestry Frame. c. 1881. Oil on canvas. 65.5×92 cm. Flint Institute of Arts
(gift of the Whiting Foundation). Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and
Histories of Art. By Griselda Pollock. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. 58.
— — . Lydia Crocheting in the Garden. 1880. Oil on canvas. 66×94 cm. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and
Histories of Art. By Griselda Pollock. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. 58.
— — . Modern Woman. 1893. Scans made of photographs of Cassatt’s mural as it was
displayed in the Women’s Building in 1893.
<http://members.cox.net/academia/cassatt.html>. Web-page consulted 27 October
2005.
— — . Young Girl in a Blue Armchair. 1878. Oil on canvas. 89×130 cm. National Gallery of
Art, Washington (Collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon). Vision and Difference:
Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art. By Griselda Pollock. London and New
York: Routledge. 65.
Delaunay, Robert. Eiffel Tower (Tour Eiffel). 1910. Oil on canvas. 116×97 (45 ¾×38 ¼).
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Cubism. By David Cottington.
London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1998. 48.
Degas, Edgar. Le Tub. 1885-86. Pastel on paper. Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Ct, USA.
<http://www.abcgallery.com/D/degas/dehas56.html>. Web-page consulted 18
December 2005.
Duchamp, Marcel. L. H. O. O. Q. 1919. Readymade: pencil on a reproduction of the Mona
Lisa. 19.7×12.4 cm. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
<http://www.abcgallery.com/D/duchamp/duchamp24.html>. Web-page consulted 5
January 2006.
203
— — . Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2 (Nu descendant l’escalier, no 2). 1912. Oil on
canvas.
57
7/8×35
1/8.
The
Louise
and
Walter
<http://www.archive.com/artchive/D/duchamp.html>.
Arensberg
Web-page
Collection.
consulted
12
January 2006.
— — . Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train (Nu [esquisse], jeune homme triste dans un
train). 1911-12. Oil on cardboard. 100×73 cm. Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
<http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_lg_43_l.html>.
Web-page
consulted 18 October 2004.
Eluard, Nusch. Photo-collage. c. 1935. Photo-collage postcard. 5 ×3½ (13.6×8.6). Private
collection. Photo courtesy of Timothy Baum. Women Artists and The Surrealist
Movement. By Whitney Chadwick. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985. 144.
— — . Photo-collage. c. 1935. Photo-collage postcard. 5 ×3½ (13.6×8.6). Private collection.
Photo courtesy of Timothy Baum. Women Artists and The Surrealist Movement. By
Whitney Chadwick. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985. 144.
Gauguin, Paul. The Vision after the Sermon, or Jacob’s Struggle with the Angel (Lutte de
Jacob avec l’ange). 1888. Oil on canvas. 73×92. National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh. Paul Gauguin. By Yann le Pichon. Trans. Saara Palmgren. Helsinki:
Kirjayhtymä, 1987. 82-83.
Gogh van, Vincent. The All-Night Café. 1888. Oil on canvas. 70×89 cm. Yale University Art
Gallery, New Haven. Maailman taide: Realismi. By Markku Valkonen and Olli
Valkonen. Helsinki, Porvoo, Juva: Werner Söderström osakeyhtiö, 1983. 22-23.
Hopper, Edward. House by the Railroad. 1925. Oil on canvas. 61×73,7 cm. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Edward Hopper 1882-1967: Todellisuuden transformaatioita.
By Rolf Günther Renner. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1991. 30.
204
John, Gwen. The Artist in her Room in Paris. 1907-09. Oil on canvas. 10¾×9 (27.5×23). Sara
John. Gwen John. By Mary Taubman. London: Scolar Press, 1985. Plate 40.
— — . The Convalescent. c. 1923. Oil on canvas. 16 ×13 (41×33). Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge. Gwen John. By Mary Taubman. London: Scolar Press, 1985. Plate 50.
— — . A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris (with Flowers). 1907-09. Oil on canvas.
12½×10½ (32×26.5). Sheffield City Art Galleries. Gwen John. By Mary Taubman.
London: Scolar Press, 1985. Plate 22.
— — . A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris (with Book). 1907-09. Oil on canvas over board.
12½×10 (32×25.5). Private collection. Gwen John. By Mary Taubman. London: Scolar
Press, 1985. Plate 23.
— — . Dorelia in a Black Dress. 1903-04. Oil on canvas. 28¾×19¼ (73×49). Tate Gallery,
London. Gwen John. By Mary Taubman. London: Scolar Press, 1985. Plate 15.
— — . Mère Poussepin. 1913-21. Oil on canvas. 34¾×25¾ (88×65.5). National Museum of
Wales. Gwen John. By Mary Taubman. London: Scolar Press, 1985. Plate 40.
— — . The Student. 1903-04. Oil on canvas. 22 ×13 (56×33). City of Manchester Art
Galleries. Gwen John. By Mary Taubman. London: Scolar Press, 1985. Plate 14.
— — . The Teapot. c. 1915-16. Oil on canvas. 13×9½ (33×24). Yale University Art Gallery.
The James W. and Mary C. Fosburgh collection. Gwen John. By Mary Taubman.
London: Scolar Press, 1985. Plate 47.
Kahlo, Frida. Two Nudes in a Forest. 1939. Oil on sheet metal. 9×12 (23×30.2). Formerly
Collection of Dolores del Rio, Mexico City. Present location unknown. Women Artists
and The Surrealist Movement. By Whitney Chadwick. Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1985. 144.
205
Kernn-Larsen, Rita. Apple. 1934. Oil on canvas. 38½×29
(98×74). Private collection.
Photo courtesy of Rita Kernn-Larsen Grünberg. Women Artists and The Surrealist
Movement. By Whitney Chadwick. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985. 145.
— — . Les Deux Demoiselles. 1940. Oil on canvas. 25½×19
(65×50). Private collection.
Photo courtesy of Rita Kernn-Larsen Grünberg. Women Artists and The Surrealist
Movement. By Whitney Chadwick. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985. 145.
Masson, André. La Terre. 1939. Sand and oil on wood. 17×20 (43×53). Collection of the
Musée National d’Art Modern, paris, Centre Georges Pompidou. Women Artists and
The Surrealist Movement. By Whitney Chadwick. Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1985. 145.
Monet, Claude. Boulevard des Capucines. 1873. Oil on canvas. 79.4×59.1 cm (31 ¼ ×23 ¼
in.) Atkins Museum, Nelson Gallery, Kansas City. Claude Monet: The First of the
Impressionists. By Brian Petrie. Oxford: Phaidon, 1979. 42-43.
— — . Haystacks, Late Summer. 1890-91. Oil on canvas. 60.5×100.5 (23 7/8×39 5/8 in.).
Claude Monet: The First of the Impressionists. By Brian Petrie. Oxford: Phaidon, 1979.
68-69.
Morisot, Berthe. Harbour at Lorient. 1869. Oil on canvas. 17×28¾ (43×73 cm). National
Galler of Art, Washington (Ailsa Mellon Collection). Impressionists. By Denis
Thomas. London, New York, Sydney, Toronto: Hamlyn, 1975. 52-53.
— — . In the Dining Room. 1886. Oil on canvas. 24¼×19¾ in (61×50). National Gallery of
Art, Washington. ). Impressionists. By Denis Thomas. London, New York, Sydney,
Toronto: Hamlyn, 1975. 54.
206
— — .View of Paris from the Trocadero. 1872. Oil on canvas. 45.9×81.4 cm. Santa Barbara
Museum, California. Dictionary of Women Artists, Volume 2. By Delia Gaze ed.
London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997. 972.
— — . Woman at her Toilet. 1875. Oil on canvas. 23¾×31¾ in (60×80 cm). Art Institute of
Chicago (Stickney Fund). Impressionists. By Denis Thomas. London, New York,
Sydney, Toronto: Hamlyn, 1975. 55.
Munch, Edward. The Cry (Skrik). 1893. Oil, tempera, and pastel on board. 91×73,5 cm.
Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. Edward Munch 1863-1944. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen
Verlag, 1991. 52.
Picasso, Pablo. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 1907. Oil on canvas. 8×7.8in (243.9×233.7 cm).
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
<http://www.moma.org./collection/conservation/demoiselles/index.html>. Web-page
consulted 5 January 2006.
Russolo, Luigi. Memories of the Night (Ricordi di una notte). 1911. Oil on canvas. 100×101
cm. Private collection, New York. Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting
in Europe, 1900–1916. By Christopher Butler. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 143.
3. Photographs:
Ethel Smyth, Monk’s House. c. 1931. From Virginia Woolf’s Monk House album 3.
Terpinted by persmission of the Harvard Theatre Collection, The Houghton Library.
Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography
and Cinema. By Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. 61.
207
Quentin and Julian Bell, Charleston. 1919. From the Vanessa Bell photo albums, Tate
Archive. Reprinted by permission of the Tate Archive and Charleston Trust. Modernist
Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema.
By Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. 127.
Vanessa and Julian Bell, Asheham. 1912. From the Vanessa Bell photo albums, Tate Archive.
Reprinted by permission of the Tate Archive and the Charleston Trust. Modernist
Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema.
By Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. 110.
Virginia Stephen and Clive Bell, Studland. 1910. From the Vanessa Bell photo albums, Tate
Archive. Reprinted by permission of the Tate Archive and the Charleston Trust.
Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography
and Cinema. By Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. 103.
208